Automated vision inspection of rail surface cracks: A double-layer data-driven framework

A double-layer data-driven framework for the automated vision inspection of the rail surface cracks is proposed in this paper. Based on images of rails, the proposed framework is capable to detect the location of cracks firstly and next automatically obtain the boundary of cracks via a feature-based linear iterative crack aggregation (FLICA). Extended Haar-like features are applied to develop significant features for identifying cracks in images. Built on extended Haar-like features, a cascading classifier ensemble integrating three single cascading classifiers with a major voting scheme is proposed to decide the presence of cracks in the image. Each single cascading classifier is composed of a sequence of stage classifiers trained by the LogitBoost algorithm. A scalable sliding window carrying the cascading classifier ensemble is applied to scan images of rail tracks, which is identified by the Otsu’s method, and detect cracks. After completing the crack registration in the first layer, the FLICA is developed to discover boundaries of cracks. The effectiveness of the proposed data-driven framework for identifying rail surface cracks is validated with the rail images provided by the China Railway Corporation and Hong Kong Mass Transit Railway (MRT). Six benchmarking methods, the Otsu’s method, mean shift, the visual detection system, the geometrical approach, fully convolutional networks and the U-net, are utilized to prove advantages of the proposed framework. Results of the validation and comparative analyses demonstrate that the proposed framework is most effective in the rail surface crack detection.