Obstacle Detection Method of Underground Electric Locomotive Rail Based on Instance Segmentation

Real-time and accurate obstacle detection is a vital technology for electric locomotives, especially as driverless vehicles are introduced. A method of obstacle detection for underground electric locomotive rail based on instance segmentation is developed to solve the problems of misdetection and missing detection, low detection accuracy, and slow detection speed of rail obstacles. The method of locating the track mask, demarcating the effective driving boundary, expanding the track mask, and forming the effective driving area is adopted to verify whether the target is an obstacle based on whether the target is located in the effective driving area, to avoid the problem of misdetection and missing detection of the target obstacle. The YOLACT++ (You Only Look At CoefficienTs) model is improved, and path augmentation and target classification loss function replacement strategies are adopted to enhance the model’s ability to detect target details and increase the accuracy of target segmentation. Compared with traditional image processing, this method can detect both straight rail and turnout. The mean average precision of boundary box mAP 0.5 (box) and mask mAP 0.5 (mask) of the improved YOLACT++ model reaches 98.52% and 98.55%, which is higher than that of the YOLACT++ model, and the detection frame rate reaches 21.9 frames per second.