Automated crack detection of train rivets using fluorescent magnetic particle inspection and instance segmentation

The railway rivet is one of the most important and easily damaged parts of the connection. If rivets develop cracks during the production process, their load-bearing capacity will be reduced, thereby increasing the risk of failure. Fluorescent magnetic particle flaw detection (FMPFD) is a widely used inspection method for train fasteners. Manual inspection is not only time-consuming but also prone to miss detection, therefore intelligent detection system has important application value. However, the fluorescent crack images obtained by FMPFD present challenges for intelligent detection, such as the dense, multi-scaled and uninstantiated cracks. In addition, there is limited research on fluorescent rivet crack detection. This paper adopts instance segmentation to achieve automatic cracks detection of rivets. A decentralized target center and low overlap rate labeling method is proposed, and a Gaussian-weighted correction post-processing method is introduced to improve the recall rate in the areas of dense cracks. An efficient channel spatial attention mechanism for feature extraction is proposed in order to enhance the detection of multi-scale cracks. For uninstantiated cracks, an improvement of crack detection in uninstantiated regions based on multi task feature learning is proposed, thoroughly utilizing the semantic and spatial features of the fluorescent cracks. The experimental results show that the improved methods are better than the baseline and some cutting-edge algorithms, achieving a recall rate and mAP_0.5 of 86.4% and 90.3%. In addition, a single coil non-contact train rivet composite magnetization device is built for rivets that can magnetize different shapes of rivets and has universality.