A Nested Residual Encoder-Decoder Network for Overhead Contact System Fastener Anomaly Detection

An overhead contact system (OCS) is key to providing power to high-speed railways. OCS detection is an important measure to ensure the safe operation of a high-speed railway. At present, OCS anomaly detection mainly relies on the manual analysis of the images regularly collected by the 4C system, which is very inefficient and can easily miss anomalies. Although some classification and object detection methods based on deep learning can be used for OCS anomaly detection, the effective training of deep networks can be difficult to support due to the small number of anomaly OCS image samples. Considering that most OCS faults are abnormal fasteners, we propose an abnormal detection method based on normal images, called the nested residual encoder-decoder network (NRE-Net). This network consists of two nested encoder-decoder networks, where the encoder is the shared part, and a residual structure is added to the encoding and decoding branches to enhance the feature expression ability. The experimental results show that the method can greatly improve the accuracy of anomaly detection for the CIFAR-10 dataset and OCS fastener dataset. Compared with the previous state-of-the-art approaches, the F
₁
score of the proposed method for the two classes fastener in the OCS fastener dataset has increased by 10.8% and 11.9%, respectively.