A Lightweight NMS-free Framework for Real-time Visual Fault Detection System of Freight Trains
This work addresses real-time fault detection for railway safety, representing an incremental improvement with domain-specific optimizations.
The paper tackles the problem of high computational cost in real-time vision-based fault detection for freight trains by proposing a lightweight NMS-free framework, achieving over 83 frames per second with higher accuracy and smaller model size than state-of-the-art detectors.
Real-time vision-based system of fault detection (RVBS-FD) for freight trains is an essential part of ensuring railway transportation safety. Most existing vision-based methods still have high computational costs based on convolutional neural networks. The computational cost is mainly reflected in the backbone, neck, and post-processing, i.e., non-maximum suppression (NMS). In this paper, we propose a lightweight NMS-free framework to achieve real-time detection and high accuracy simultaneously. First, we use a lightweight backbone for feature extraction and design a fault detection pyramid to process features. This fault detection pyramid includes three novel individual modules using attention mechanism, bottleneck, and dilated convolution for feature enhancement and computation reduction. Instead of using NMS, we calculate different loss functions, including classification and location costs in the detection head, to further reduce computation. Experimental results show that our framework achieves over 83 frames per second speed with a smaller model size and higher accuracy than the state-of-the-art detectors. Meanwhile, the hardware resource requirements of our method are low during the training and testing process.