UAV imagery-based railroad station building inspection using hybrid learning architecture

Abstract

The apparent defects of railroad station building such as the broken glass, missing screw, and rust corrosion need to be inspected regularly and timely to ensure the safety of passenger. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) imagery-based inspections have the potential to revolutionize current manual visual inspections by providing a better overhead view and mitigating safety concerns. This paper proposes a hybrid learning architecture called YOLOS (you only look once station scene) to simultaneously detect and segment station building surface defects of UAV images. First, a novel squeeze-and-excitation (SE) attention block is integrated into the detection branch to adaptively learn the weights of the feature channels, thereby promoting the network to pay attention to the critical deep features of the objects. And then, a new semantic segmentation branch parallel to the detection branch is designed and assembled in YOLOS for pixel-level defect recognition. Finally, extensive experiments on railroad station dataset established with drone imagery prove the effectiveness and robustness of the SE-based network on station surface defect detection. This method can quickly convert UAV imagery into useful information with a high detection rate.