Enhanced Rail Surface Defect Segmentation Using Polarization Imaging and Dual-Stream Feature Fusion

Rail surface defects pose significant risks to the operational efficiency and safety of industrial equipment. Traditional visual defect detection methods typically rely on high-quality RGB images; however, they struggle in low-light conditions due to small, low-contrast defects that blend into complex backgrounds. Therefore, this paper proposes a novel defect segmentation method leveraging a dual-stream feature fusion network that combines polarization images with DeepLabV3+. The approach utilizes the pruned MobileNetV3 as the backbone network, incorporating a coordinate attention mechanism for feature extraction. This reduces the number of model parameters and enhances computational efficiency. The dual-stream module implements cascade and addition strategies to effectively merge shallow and deep features from both the original and polarization images. This enhances the detection of low-contrast defects in complex backgrounds. Furthermore, the CBAM is integrated into the decoding area to refine feature fusion and mitigate the issue of missing small-target defects. Experimental results demonstrate that the enhanced DeepLabV3+ model outperforms existing models such as U-Net, PSPNet, and the original DeepLabV3+ in terms of MIoU and MPA metrics, achieving 73.00% and 80.59%, respectively. The comprehensive detection accuracy reaches 97.82%, meeting the demanding requirements for effective rail surface defect detection.