Deep learning based identification and tracking of railway bogie parts

Abstract

The Train Rolling-Stock Examination (TRSE) is a safety examination process that physically examines the bogie parts of a moving train, typically at speeds over 30 km/h. Currently, this inspection process is done manually by railway personnel in many countries to ensure safety and prevent interruptions to rail services. Although many earlier attempts have been made to semi-automate this process through computer-vision models, these models are iterative and still require manual intervention. Consequently, these attempts were unsuitable for real-time implementations. In this work, we propose a detection model by utilizing a deep-learning based classifier that can precisely identify bogie parts in real-time without manual intervention, allowing an increase in the deployability of these inspection systems. We implemented the Anchor-Free Yolov8 (AFYv8) model, which has a decoupled-head module for recognizing bogie parts. Additionally, we incorporated bogie parts tracking with the AFYv8 model to gather information about any missing parts. To test the effectiveness of the AFYv8-model, the bogie videos were captured at three different timestamps and the result shows the increase in the recognition accuracy of TRSE by 10 % compared to the previously developed classifiers. This research has the potential to enhance railway safety and minimize operational interruptions.