A Universal Railway Obstacle Detection System based on Semi-supervised Segmentation And Optical Flow
This solves a safety-critical problem for railway systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing segmentation and optical flow techniques.
The paper tackles obstacle detection in railways by addressing out-of-distribution issues with a semi-supervised segmentation method using optical flow, achieving feasibility and effectiveness in experiments.
Detecting obstacles in railway scenarios is both crucial and challenging due to the wide range of obstacle categories and varying ambient conditions such as weather and light. Given the impossibility of encompassing all obstacle categories during the training stage, we address this out-of-distribution (OOD) issue with a semi-supervised segmentation approach guided by optical flow clues. We reformulate the task as a binary segmentation problem instead of the traditional object detection approach. To mitigate data shortages, we generate highly realistic synthetic images using Segment Anything (SAM) and YOLO, eliminating the need for manual annotation to produce abundant pixel-level annotations. Additionally, we leverage optical flow as prior knowledge to train the model effectively. Several experiments are conducted, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of our approach.