Railroad Surface Defect Segmentation Using a Modified Fully Convolutional Network

This research aims to develop a deep learning-based method that automatically detects and segments the defects on railroad surfaces to reduce the cost of visual inspection of the railroad. We developed our segmentation model by modifying a fully convolutional network model [1], a well-known segmentation model used for machine learning, to detect and segment railroad surface defects. The data used in this research are images of the railroad surface with one or more defect regions. Railroad images were cropped to a suitable size, considering the long height and relatively narrow width of the images. They were also normalized based on the variance and mean of the data images. Using these images, the suggested model was trained to segment the defect regions. The proposed method showed promising results in the segmentation of defects. We consider that the proposed method can facilitate decision-making about railroad maintenance, and potentially be applied for other analyses.