PFCNet: Enhancing Rail Surface Defect Detection With Pixel-Aware Frequency Conversion Networks

Applying computer vision techniques to rail surface defect detection (RSDD) is crucial for preventing catastrophic accidents. However, challenges such as complex backgrounds and irregular defect shapes persist. Previous methods have focused on extracting salient object information from a pixel perspective, thereby neglecting valuable high- and low-frequency image information, which can better capture global structural information. In this study, we design a pixel-aware frequency conversion network (PFCNet) to explore RSDD from a frequency domain perspective. We use different attention mechanisms and frequency enhancement for high-level and shallow features to explore local details and global structures comprehensively. In addition, we design a dual-control reorganization module to refine the features across levels. We conducted extensive experiments on an industrial RGB-D dataset (NEU RSDDS-AUG), and PFCNet achieved superior performance.