In the near future, combo of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) and computer vision will play a vital role in monitoring the condition of the railroad periodically to ensure passenger safety. The most significant module involved in railroad visual processing is obstacle detection, in which caution is obstacle fallen near track gage inside or outside. This leads to the importance of detecting and segment the railroad as three key regions, such as gage inside, rails, and background. Traditional railroad segmentation methods depend on either manual feature selection or expensive dedicated devices such as Lidar, which is typically less reliable in railroad semantic segmentation. Also, cameras mounted on moving vehicles like a drone can produce high-resolution images, so segmenting precise pixel information from those aerial images has been challenging due to the railroad surroundings chaos. RSNet is a multi-level feature fusion algorithm for segmenting railroad aerial images captured by UAV and proposes an attention-based efficient convolutional encoder for feature extraction, which is robust and computationally efficient and modified residual decoder for segmentation which considers only essential features and produces less overhead with higher performance even in real-time railroad drone imagery. The network is trained and tested on a railroad scenic view segmentation dataset (RSSD), which we have built from real-time UAV images and achieves 0.973 dice coefficient and 0.94 jaccard on test data that exhibits better results compared to the existing approaches like a residual unit and residual squeeze net.
Real-time Track Obstacle Detection from 3D LIDAR Point Cloud