Anomaly Detection for Vision-Based Railway Inspection

The automatic inspection of railways for the detection of obstacles is a fundamental activity in order to guarantee the safety of the train transport. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a vision-based framework that is able to detect obstacles during the night, when the train circulation is usually suspended, using RGB or thermal images. Acquisition cameras and external light sources are placed in the frontal part of a rail drone and a new dataset is collected. Experiments show the accuracy of the proposed approach and its suitability, in terms of computational load, to be implemented on a self-powered drone.