Railway Anomaly detection model using synthetic defect images generated by CycleGAN
This addresses a data scarcity issue for railway companies, enabling safer operations through improved defect detection, but it is incremental as it applies an existing method to a new domain.
The paper tackled the problem of insufficient real defective equipment images for training railway anomaly detection models by using CycleGAN to generate synthetic defect images, verifying that these images are indistinguishable from real ones and enhance detection accuracy.
Although training data is essential for machine learning, railway companies are facing difficulties in gathering adequate images of defective equipment due to their proactive replacement of would be defective equipment. Nevertheless, proactive replacement is indispensable for safe and undisturbed operation of public transport. In this research, we have developed a model using CycleGAN to generate artificial images of defective equipment instead of real images. By adopting these generated images as training data, we verified that these images are indistinguishable from real images and they play a vital role in enhancing the accuracy of the defect detection models.