RailSet: A Unique Dataset for Railway Anomaly Detection

Understanding the driving environment is one of the key factors in achieving an autonomous vehicle. In particular, the detection of anomalies in the traffic lane is a high priority scenario, as it directly involves vehicle's safety. Recent state of the art image processing techniques for anomaly detection are all based on deep learning of neural networks. These algorithms require a considerable amount of annotated data for training and test purposes. While many datasets exist in the field of autonomous road vehicles, such datasets are extremely rare in the railway domain. In this work, we present a new innovative dataset relevant for railway anomaly detection called RailSet. It consists of 6600 high-quality manually annotated images containing normal situations and 1100 images of railway defects such as hole anomaly and rails discontinuity. Due to the lack of anomaly samples in public images and difficulties to create anomalies in the railway environment, we generate artificially images of abnormal scenes, using a deep learning algorithm named StyleMapGAN. This dataset is created as a contribution to the development of autonomous trains able to perceive tracks damage in front of the train. The dataset is available at this link.