FaultNet: Faulty Rail-Valves Detection using Deep Learning and Computer Vision
This addresses the problem of costly manual inspection for railway safety, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing computer vision methods.
The paper tackles automated fault detection in rail valves by proposing a multi-phase deep learning approach that combines image segmentation with computer vision techniques, achieving improved detection performance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Regular inspection of rail valves and engines is an important task to ensure the safety and efficiency of railway networks around the globe. Over the past decade, computer vision and pattern recognition based techniques have gained traction for such inspection and defect detection tasks. An automated end-to-end trained system can potentially provide a low-cost, high throughput, and cheap alternative to manual visual inspection of these components. However, such systems require a huge amount of defective images for networks to understand complex defects. In this paper, a multi-phase deep learning based technique is proposed to perform accurate fault detection of rail-valves. Our approach uses a two-step method to perform high precision image segmentation of rail-valves resulting in pixel-wise accurate segmentation. Thereafter, a computer vision technique is used to identify faulty valves. We demonstrate that the proposed approach results in improved detection performance when compared to current state-of-theart techniques used in fault detection.