MSRConvNet: Classification of railway track defects using multi-scale residual convolutional neural network

Abstract

The development of an automated rail line defect classification system is of great benefit, as railway tracks must be periodically monitored and inspected to guarantee the safety of rail transportation. In this paper, an effective multi-scale residual convolutional network (MSRConvNet) model is proposed to classify the different types of railway track defects. The skip connections with residual learning blocks are used to increase the effectiveness of the network. The multi-scale convolutions are connected with parallel and two skip connections in the structure to distribute detailed feature maps with each other. Therefore, different scale feature maps can be extracted. The data augmentation method is performed to ensure a balanced class distribution and to eliminate the negative effect of the imbalanced dataset. The proposed model is compared with both benchmark deep learning models and the different variations of the designed network. The results verify that the proposed model can reach superior classification fulfillment, and the MSRConvNet provides an overall accuracy of 99.83%, precision of 99.83%, sensitivity of 99.83%, specificity of 99.94%, F1-score of 99.83%, and Matthew’s correlation coefficient of 99.78% for four defect classes.