Conformal prediction for trustworthy detection of railway signals

Abstract

We present an application of conformal prediction, a form of uncertainty quantification with guarantees, to the detection of railway signals. State-of-the-art architectures are tested and the most promising one undergoes the process of conformalization, where a correction is applied to the predicted bounding boxes (i.e., to their height and width) such that they comply with a predefined probability of success. We work with a novel exploratory dataset of images taken from the perspective of a train operator, as a first step to build and validate future trustworthy machine learning models for the detection of railway signals.