Rail Surface Defect Detection Based on An Improved YOLOv5s

As the operational time of the railway increases, rail surfaces undergo irreversible defects. Once the defects occur, it is easy for them to develop rapidly, which seriously threatens the safe operation of trains. Therefore, the accurate and rapid detection of rail surface defects is very important. However, in the detection of rail surface defects, there are problems, such as low contrast between defects and the background, large scale differences, and insufficient training samples. Therefore, we propose a rail surface defect detection method based on an improved YOLOv5s in this paper. Firstly, the sample dataset of rail surface defect images was augmented with flip transformations, random cropping, and brightness transformations. Next, a Conv2D and Dilated Convolution(CDConv) module was designed to reduce the amount of network computation. In addition, the Swin Transformer was combined with the Backbone and Neck ends to improve the C3 module of the original network. Then, the global attention mechanism (GAM) was introduced into PANet to form a new prediction head, namely Swin transformer and GAM Prediction Head (SGPH). Finally, we used the Soft-SIoUNMS loss to replace the original CIoU loss, which accelerates the convergence speed of the algorithm and reduces regression errors. The experimental results show that the improved YOLOv5s detection algorithm reaches 96.9% in the average precision of rail surface defect detection, offering the accurate and rapid detection of rail surface defects, which has certain engineering application value.