Real-Time Detection of Railway Track Component via One-Stage Deep Learning Networks

Railway inspection has always been a critical task to guarantee the safety of the railway transportation. The development of deep learning technologies brings new breakthroughs in the accuracy and speed of image-based railway inspection application. In this work, a series of one-stage deep learning approaches, which are fast and accurate at the same time, are proposed to inspect the key components of railway track including rail, bolt, and clip. The inspection results show that the enhanced model, the second version of you only look once (YOLOv2), presents the best component detection performance with 93% mean average precision (mAP) at 35 image per second (IPS), whereas the feature pyramid network (FPN) based model provides a smaller mAP and much longer inference time. Besides, the detection performances of more deep learning approaches are evaluated under varying input sizes, where larger input size usually improves the detection accuracy but results in a longer inference time. Overall, the YOLO series models could achieve faster speed under the same detection accuracy.