Efficient railway track region segmentation algorithm based on lightweight neural network and cross-fusion decoder

Abstract

To segment railway track regions in real-time for intrusion detection and improving security, this paper proposes an efficient railway track region segmentation network (ERTNet) based on the encoder–decoder architecture. Firstly, to ensure the lightweight of the encoder, depthwise convolution and the channel shuffle are utilized to construct sandglass-type feature extraction unit. Secondly, a feature-matching-based cross-fusion decoder is utilized to fuse deep and shallow feature maps. Thirdly, the knowledge distillation is employed with large-scale Deeplab v3+ as the teacher model to improve performance. Additionally, a loss function is proposed to penalize pixel points with large offsets. Finally, the ERTNet is validated on the self-built dataset, achieving an MIoU (Mean Intersection over Union) of 92.4% , which is 5.22% improvement over the benchmark model. ERTNet achieves a balance between segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency, requiring only 0.5 M parameters and 0.92 G FLOPs (Floating Point Operations).