Fastener and rail surface defects detection with deep learning techniques

The railways, which are frequently used by countries for both passenger and freight transportation, should be checked periodically. Controls made with classical methods are slow and there are often overlooked faults. This work suggests a novel deep learning-based technique for identifying fastener and railway track surface defects. Within the scope of the proposed method, firstly, the railroad track was observed using an autonomous drone. Shaky images in the recorded video were removed with a video stabilization algorithm. Frames were created and labeled from the video, and rail and fastener regions were detected using the Faster R-CNN deep neural network. Fault detection was performed through ResNet101v2-based classification using different datasets for identifying surface detects in rails and different datasets for the detection of fasteners. The proposed method was experimentally shown to have a 98% accuracy rate for detecting rail surface flaws and a 95% accuracy rate for detecting fastener flaws. A user interface was developed to display the identified faulty images on computers, tablets, and mobile phones via a mobile application. The system, which was previously proposed in a different study, was retrained by going through the video stabilization step, thus improving the fault detection rate, and the method was also included in the user interface module. This study contributes to the processing of ever-increasing video data with deep learning-based methods. It is also anticipated that it will benefit researchers working in the field of railway non-contact fault detection.