ResNet-based Image Classification of Railway Shelling Defect

This paper highlights the ability of residual convolutional neural network (ResNet) at classifying railway shelling defect dataset without the requirement for handcrafted features. A 41-convolutional layers ResNet with the residual learning block is introduced. Bottleneck architecture of three convolutional layers is used in ResNet to decrease the computation cost. VGG convolutional neural network (VGGNet) classifier and Support Vector Machine (SVM) classifiers based on Histogram of Oriented Gradient (HOG), Local Binary Patterns (LBP) and Scale-invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) are compared with ResNet classifier at classifying our dataset. The performance of ResNet presented in this paper achieves 95% TOP-1 accuracy in testing dataset. In comparison, the result of ResNet is better than VGGNet with 92% TOP-1 accuracy and HOG (42.88%), LBP (52.26%), SIFT (60.69%). In the context of designing neural computing models for ResNet analysis, this paper shows that ResNet used in our experiment is able to not only achieve the high accuracy in railway shelling defect testing dataset, but also has a faster testing speed than the other classifiers.