A Stable Lightweight and Adaptive Feature Enhanced Convolution Neural Network for Efficient Railway Transit Object Detection

Obstacles in front of a train pose a significant threat to traffic safety, and many accidents happen under shunting mode when the speed of a train is below 45 km/h. The existing track object–detection algorithms encounter difficulty in balancing the detection precision and speed in shunting mode. Additionally, their accuracy is insufficient, particularly for small objects in complex environments. To address these problems, we propose a stable lightweight feature extraction and adaptive feature fusion network for real-time detection of obstacles in railway traffic scenarios to ensure driving safety. The proposed network consists of three modules. The stable bottom feature extraction module reduces the computational load and extracts more image information stably. The lightweight feature extraction module improves feature extraction using a simple and effective network. The enhanced adaptive feature fusion module fuses the image and original features, improving the multiscale detection accuracy under complex environments, particularly in the case of small objects. With a default input size of 416$\times 416$pixels (px), the proposed method achieves a detection speed of 81 FPS and a mean average precision of 94.75% for the railway traffic dataset as well as a detection speed of 78 FPS (26 FPS faster and 0.47% higher than those of YOLOv4, respectively) and a mean average precision of 42.5% for MS COCO. This indicates its potential for real-world railway object detection and other multi-target detection tasks. Additionally, the experimental results based on PASCAL VOC2007 and VOC2012 indicate that the proposed approach is considerably better than the state-of-the-art models.