A Unified Light Framework for Real-Time Fault Detection of Freight Train Images

Real-time fault detection for freight trains plays a vital role in guaranteeing the security and optimal operation of railway transportation under stringent resource requirements. Despite the promising results for deep-learning-based approaches, the performance of these fault detectors on freight train images is far from satisfactory in both accuracy and efficiency. This article proposes a unified light framework to improve detection accuracy while supporting a real-time operation with a low-resource requirement. We first design a novel lightweight backbone (real-time fault detection network—RFDNet) to improve the accuracy and reduce computational cost. Then, we propose a multiregion proposal network using multiscale feature maps generated from the RFDNet to improve the detection performance. Finally, we present multilevel position-sensitive score maps and region of interest pooling to further improve accuracy with few redundant computations. Extensive experimental results on public benchmark datasets suggest that our RFDNet can significantly improve the performance of the baseline network with higher accuracy and efficiency. Experiments on six fault datasets show that our method is capable of real-time detection at over 38 frames/s and achieves competitive accuracy and lower computation than the state-of-the-art detectors.