Fault detection of train mechanical parts using multi-mode aggregation feature enhanced convolution neural network

Faults in train mechanical parts pose a significant safety hazard to railway transportation. Although some image detection methods have replaced manual fault detection of train mechanical parts, the detection effect on small mechanical parts under low illumination conditions is not ideal. To improve the accuracy and efficiency of the detection of train faults under different environments, we propose a multi-mode aggregation feature enhanced network (MAFENet) based on a single-stage detector (SSD). This network uses the idea of a two-step adjustment structure from coarse to fine and uses the K-means algorithm to design anchors. The receptive field enhancement module (RFEM) is designed to obtain the fusion features of different receptive fields. The attention-guided detail feature enhancement module (ADEM) is designed to complement the detailed features of deep-level feature maps. Meanwhile, the complete intersection over union (CIoU) loss is used to obtain more accurate bounding boxes. The experimental results on the train mechanical parts fault (TMPF) dataset showed that the detection performance of MAFENet is better than those of other SSD models. MAFENet with an input size of 320 × 320 pixels can achieve a mean average precision (mAP) of 0.9787 and a detection speed of 33 frames per second (FPS), which indicates that it can realize real-time detection, has good robustness to images under different environmental conditions, and can be used to improve the efficiency of the detection of faulty train parts.