Unsupervised Rail Surface Defect Detection Method

Railroad travel has become an essential part of modern life, therefore, rail surface defect detection has become a problem that cannot be ignored. However, most of the currently existing methods often require a large number of defect samples for learning, which are labor-intensive and very difficult to obtain. In order to alleviate the data dependence of the detection model, this paper proposes an unsupervised method. Specifically, we use Transformer’s attention mechanism to construct the encoder-decoder structure and train it only on normal samples with the purpose of reconstruction, so that those regions that cannot be reconstructed will be regarded as defects at the time of detection. To prevent the model from generalizing its generalization ability to those unknown defective samples, i.e., to avoid overgeneralization, we introduce a noise perturbation in the training so that the model focuses on the reconstruction of normal features. Experiments show that the proposed unsupervised approach outperforms a host of supervised models with low data requirements and can effectively address the current challenges of track defect detection.