Proc.
of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (IEEE ICSIPA 2017), Malaysia,
September 12-14, 2017
A Vision-Based Method for the Detection of
Missing Rail Fasteners
Thanawit Prasongpongchai∗ , Thanarat H. Chalidabhongse† , Sangsan Leelhapantu‡
Department of Computer Engineering
Faculty of Engineering, Chulalongkorn University
Bangkok, Thailand
Email: thanawit.p@student.chula.ac.th∗ , taepras@gmail.com∗ , thanarat.c@chula.ac.th† , sangsan momo@hotmail.com‡
Abstract—Visual inspection of rail fasteners is crucial to
rail safety. However, the traditional method in which railway
staffs manually inspect the conditions of fasteners is time-
consuming and prone to human error. In this paper, we present
a method to automatically detect missing rail fasteners from
top-view images. Using a top-down approach, coarse bounding
boxes of potential fastener areas are first located from the
track and the tie regions with an edge density map and the
RANSAC algorithm. Preprocessed with the guided filter, the
region within the bounding boxes are then scanned to detect
rail fasteners using PHOG features and -SVR with RBF
kernel. The boxes, in which no fasteners are found, are reported
as missing fasteners. The proposed method was tested and has
shown a degree of robustness in scenes from complex real-
world environments with the 100% probability of detection and
3.47% probability of false alarm for missing fastener detection.
The results also indicate that the use of guided filter, RBF
kernel and the image pyramid technique for feature extraction
significantly improves the performance of the classifier.
I. I NTRODUCTION
Rail fastener is a crucial component in rail systems that
fixes rail tracks and ties together. For concrete ties, two types
of rail fasteners: hexagonal-headed bolts, and hook-shaped
fasteners or rail clips, are commonly used [1]. Defects in
and absence of the component, as shown in Fig. 1b, can
be the cause of serious injuries such as train derailment.
Thus, constant monitoring of rail fasteners conditions is
essential to ensure safety. However, rail fastener inspection
is traditionally done in term of visual inspection by human
i.e. railway staffs walk along the railway to inspect whether
there are any defects in fasteners and other rail components.
Such method of inspection consumes a huge amount of time
and is prone to human errors. As a result, automatic rail
inspection vehicles are becoming available.
In this paper, we aim to develop an algorithm to detect
missing rail fasteners from top-view images of rail ties. Such
(a) intact fasteners (b) missing (left) and intact fasten-
ers (right)
Fig. 1: Examples of intact and missing rail fasteners.
978-1-5090-5559-3/17/$31.00 ©2017 IEEE
systems can be used with cameras installed under automatic
rail inspection vehicles.
A top-down approach is used in our method to classify
the status of the fasteners in each image. The method can
be roughly divided into two steps: fastener region estimation
and missing fastener detection. In the first step, coarse
regions of possible fastener locations are estimated from the
track and the tie using edge density map. The regions are
located at each side of the intersection between the lines
that represent the track and tie. The located regions are then
scanned in the next step to determine whether each region
contains a fastener. This is done to detect existing fasteners
using PHOG features and -SVR. Finally, if no fasteners are
detected, a missing fastener report is filed.
The remaining part of this paper is organized into 6
sections. In section II, a survey of current methods in
missing rail fastener detection is presented. Next, the image
acquisition process and the dataset used in this study are
described in section III. Details of fastener region estimation
and missing fastener detection are presented in section IV
and section V respectively. In section VI, we show the
experimental results from our proposed method as it was
tested in real-world environments. We conclude our findings
and discuss the future work in section VII.
II. R ELATED W ORK
Since the early 2000s, a number of vision-based methods
for rail fastener inspection have been proposed. Stella et al.
[2] presented a wavelet transform-based method to recognize
hexagonal-headed rail-fastening bolts and rail clips using a
3-layer neural classifier. Singh et al. [3] used edge density
for detecting missing fasteners from videos. Marino et al. [4]
proposed the VISyR system for detecting hexagonal bolts
in real-time using multilayer perceptron neural classifiers
(MLPMCs). In [5], Xia et al. presented an approach to
detect broken rail fasteners with a method based on Haar-like
features and the Adaboost algorithm by dividing the fastener
region into several parts. Yang et al. [6] employed direction
fields as the feature to detect missing rail clips from images.
In [1], Feng et al. utilized structural topic model to model the
fastener a method for the inspection of rail fasteners. Harris-
Stephen and Shi-Tomasi feature detectors were also used by
Khan et al. [7] to detect missing rail clips in image. In [8],
Gibert et al. proposed a method to assess and classify rail
fasteners using Histogram of Gradient (HOGs) and a group
of Support Vector Machines (SVMs) with linear kernel.
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 Proc. of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (IEEE ICSIPA 2017), Malaysia,
September 12-14, 2017
Fig. 2: Camera configuration for image acquisition.
Later, they introduced a multitask learning approach for the
problem in [9].
From the literature, it can be seen that the desired
characteristics of a missing fastener detection system is
that it should be robust to a wide intra-class variance of
the appearances of fasteners including illumination changes,
occlusions and different appearances of the fasteners in
terms of texture and color.
A shape-based feature extractor could be used to re-
duce the mentioned intra-class variance. The Histograms of
Oriented Gradients (HOG) feature extractor [10] proposed
by Dalal and Triggs is well-known for its robustness in
the domain of person detection. The descriptor was later
used in many other shape-based object recognition tasks. In
[11], Bosch et al. proposed the use of the image pyramid
technique with HOG and proposed the Pyramid Histograms
of Oriented Gradients (PHOG) feature extractor. This new
PHOG descriptor improved the object recognition perfor-
mance of the traditional HOG descriptor.
III. I MAGE ACQUISITION
The images used in this study were taken from several
locations along the railway of the State Railway of Thailand
(SRT) in Bangkok, Thailand, with an 8-megapixel smart-
phone camera. For each picture, the camera was held at
approximately 60 to 90 centimeters above the rail facing
towards the ground as shown in Fig. 2. Slight rotations in
the images are observed since the camera was held by hand.
The resulting images are top-view images of the crossing
between a track and a tie similar to that shown in Fig. 1.
The dataset contains only fasteners of e-clip type since it is
the most common type of fastener in SRT railways.
The images were then annotated using a custom bounding
box marking tool. This tool was developed for this study
in order to acquire the ground truth of location and size of
fasteners appearing in the images and their conditions: good,
missing, partially occluded, or uninspectable. The bounding
boxes were drawn as tight as possible to the edges of the
fasteners in order to ensure the consistency in the dataset.
Fastener locations in the image and their conditions were
collected to be used as the training data for our classification
model and also for the evaluation of our method.
As shown in Fig. 3, a number of complex scenes are
present in the dataset and large variety of visual conditions
are observed. From our visual inspection, variations in the
appearance of fasteners in the dataset include illumination
changes, textures, and colors. Partial and full occlusions of
fasteners are also present as some fasteners are obscured by
plants growing on the railway, litter, or rail ballasts.
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Fig. 3: Variation of visual conditions observed in the dataset.
A number of fasteners in the dataset are obscured with dirt,
rust, grease, litter, plants, stones, etc.
IV. FASTENER R EGION E STIMATION
As fasteners are installed on ties on each side of a track,
coarse location of the fastener can be determined from the
regions of the track and the tie. This step is performed in
order to 1) minimize the search space for the actual fastener
recognition and classification step and 2) reduce the chance
of false detection of fasteners in the other areas of the image.
The proposed method of fastener region estimation is
robust to slight rotations and scaling variations, which can
be expected to occur since different automatic rail inspection
systems may have different camera configurations. These are
the steps to acquire the coarse position of the fasteners:
A. Track and Tie Segmentation
Since the acquired images were collected from a railway
containing ballast, crushed stones that form the trackbed,
the areas in the image containing ballast are generally more
cluttered than the areas with the track and the tie. With this
assumption, the image can be segmented to determine the
track and tie regions using edge density.
After converting the input image to grayscale, local nor-
malization and the guided filter [12] is applied to strengthen
the edges and reducing the noise as shown in Fig. 4b.
Requiring two inputs: the image to be filtered and the guide,
the guided filter computes the output based on both inputs.
Using the input image itself as the guide, the filter can act as
an edge-preserving blur filter. After that, an edge magnitude
map as illustrated in Fig. 4c is obtained by means of the
Sobel filter. Then, box blur is applied to the edge map and
inverted to create an edge density map. Next, histogram
equalization and gamma correction are performed in order
to increase the discrimination between low and high edge
density areas. Fig. 4d shows the processed edge density map.
Finally, the processed density map is thresholded with Otsu’s
method [13]. From these steps, the track and tie region in
the image is acquired as a binary mask as shown in Fig. 4e
B. Fastener Position Estimation
A slightly modified version of Random Sample Consensus
algorithm (RANSAC) [14] is performed on the binary mask
from the last step to gain the lines that go along the track
 Proc. of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (IEEE ICSIPA 2017), Malaysia,
September 12-14, 2017
(a) (b) (c)
(d) (e)
Fig. 4: The result from each step of track and tie segmen-
tation: (a) input image, (b) preprocessed image, (c) edge
magnitude map, (d) edge density, and (e) the resulting mask
of track and tie area.
and the tie. RANSAC is an iterative process that aims to fit
a straight line to the given set of points or pixels. In each
iteration, a pair of points are sampled to form a candidate
line. Every point with the distance to the line not exceeding
a pre-specified margin is then counted as the score of the
line. In traditional RANSAC, the line with the highest score
is considered the fitting line.
In our method, the margin of RANSAC is set to the
maximum value of the distance transform map computed
from the binary mask which is approximately half the width
of the tie. This helps dealing with the variation in scale
observed in the dataset. In our implementation of RANSAC,
since we need two lines to represent the track and the tie,
we choose the highest ranked sample as the first line and
the next highest ranked sample with angle to the first line
greater than a thresholding value θ. In this study, we use
θ = 80◦ . The line with the higher slope is then regarded as
the track line and the other as the tie line. With no angle
constraints applied to the first line, it can be expected that
the algorithm will be robust to slight rotations.
The coarse bounding boxes containing areas where a
fastener should be installed are determined as the regions
next to the intersection between the track line and the tie
line. The bounding boxes are shifted from the intersection
point to each side of the track along the tie line to cover
the areas where fasteners are expected to be present. The
distance the bounding boxes is shifted depends on the
estimated width of the tie. An example of the results from
our fastener region estimation method with the track and tie
lines computed from the last step is presented in Fig. 5
V. M ISSING FASTENER D ETECTION
After getting coarse bounding boxes of the areas that are
expected to contain fasteners, the image within the box is
then classified whether a fastener is present. In this step,
refined region of interest for the fastener is also estimated
and a missing fastener will eventually be reported if no
fasteners were detected in each bounding box.
A. Image Preprocessing
While rail fasteners of the same type have similar shapes,
their appearances vary a lot in term of colors and textures
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Fig. 5: Example result from our fastener region estimation
method. The estimated bounding boxes are shown as green
rectangles. The blue (dashed) and red (dotted) lines are the
computed track and tie lines respectively.
Fig. 6: Visualization of PHOG features of an image region
containing a fastener.
as new fasteners are coated with paint, whereas some old
ones are covered in dirt, rust, or grease. In order to cope
with these variations, we first preprocess each input image
by converting it to grayscale to eliminate the variation in
color and applying the guided filter [12] to reduce the effect
of the variation in texture before proceeding to the next step.
B. Feature Extraction
Pyramid Histogram of Oriented Gradients (PHOG) [11] is
chosen as the feature vector to describe the image patches.
Developed further from the Histogram of Oriented Gradients
(HOG) [10] feature extractor which is well-known for its
usage in person detection, PHOG is considered suitable for
object detection where shape is the main characteristics in
consideration.
To extract PHOG vectors, multiple HOG features with
different cell sizes are computed from the window in con-
sideration. The cell width and height are doubled in every
iteration to form the image pyramid. The resulting vectors
are normalized with their magnitudes and concatenated
together to get the PHOG vector of the region. Fig. 6
visualizes the PHOG features of an image region containing
a fastener by showing HOG features at each pyramid layer.
Using edge direction and its spatial information, we can
see that PHOG emphasizes the shape of the object to be
modeled i.e. objects with the same shape have low intra-
class variance when represented as a PHOG vector. Using
the pyramid technique helps the algorithm cope better with
variations in the texture of the object. Moreover, since local
normalization is performed on the feature vector when HOG
descriptors are computed, PHOG is robust to illumination
changes. These are the desired properties of feature vectors
for this task since there is a considerable variation in the
appearance of fasteners due to different lighting conditions
and the surrounding environment.
 Proc. of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (IEEE ICSIPA 2017), Malaysia,
September 12-14, 2017
Fig. 7: Examples of the cropped images for training our
classifier. Positive samples of fasteners are shown in the top
row, negative samples containing missing fastener regions
are shown in the middle row, and background patches are
shown in the bottom row.
In our implementation, the number of pyramid layers we
used is 3. The window size of the PHOG is 64 by 64 pixels
with the starting cell size of 8 by 8 pixels, starting block
size of 16 by 16 pixels, and the number of HOG bins of 9.
The size of each resulting PHOG feature vector is 2,124.
C. Training the Model
Epsilon Support Vector Regression (-SVR) [15] with
radial basis function (RBF) kernel is used for classifying
the input image regions whether it contains any fasteners.
-SVR is a type of Support Vector Machine (SVM) which is
used for regression problems. A benefit of using a regression
model for a binary classification problem is that the thresh-
old value for classification can be adjusted afterwards. This
is beneficial in practical use of the system where users will
be able to adjust the threshold value in inspection sessions.
To train the model, each image in the dataset is pre-
processed with the guided filter [12]. Then, a number of
image patches are cropped from the dataset. For the positive
samples, fastener regions padded with a small margin are
cropped from the dataset. The size of the margin is set to
1/8 of the width of the area. All of the sample patches with
a fastener are rotated to acquire a consistent orientation. The
negative training set is sampled from 1) areas on the tie with
missing fasteners and 2) background patches cropped from
random areas in the parts of the images without fasteners
e.g. on the track, tie, ballasts, etc. The negative samples
are also flipped horizontally, vertically and rotated by 180
degrees to increase sample size. All of the samples were
finally resized to 64 by 64 pixels. Examples of the sample
patches are presented in Fig. 7.
The parameters we used for the -SVR in our implemen-
tation are  = 0.001 and c = 1 and the parameter γ of the
RBF kernel is set to 1.
PHOG feature vectors are then extracted from the image
patches. Samples with a fastener and other samples are
labeled as 1 and 0 respectively. The SVR model is finally
trained with the resulting feature vectors and their labels.
D. Classification
The image cropped with the bounding box from the region
estimation step is the input of this step. The input image is
first scaled into several sizes to enable multi-scale detection
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Fig. 8: SVR score maps at different scales (left) with the re-
sulting detection windows drawn on the preprocessed Image
(right), bright area indicates high score at the corresponding
top-left position of the window.
of fasteners. In our implementation, the input image was
scaled into 6 different sizes with the longer size from 180
pixels wide to 80 pixels wide. Each resized image is then
scanned with a 64×64 pixels sliding window with the stride
of 8 pixels. For each window, we extract a PHOG feature
vector and compute a regression value from our trained SVR
model as a score of that window. The score s of the entire
input image is calculated as
s = max SV R(P HOG(w))
w∈W
where w is the image area cropped by the sliding window
and W is the set of all possible sliding windows within
the image. If the region has a score higher than the user-
adjustable threshold τ , we conclude that the region contains
a fastener, otherwise the fastener is missing. The window
wmax that gives the maximum score is considered the area
containing the fastener. By this way, a refined bounding box
of the fastener is also acquired. The score maps at different
scales are illustrated in Fig. 8. The resulting detection
windows are shown on the right. We can see from the score
map that the score rises significantly at the region containing
the fastener.
VI. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS
To evaluate the proposed method, it was tested with the
dataset mentioned in section III. The dataset contains 758
images with 1,518 regions of interest expected to contain rail
fasteners. From these regions, there are 1,450 good fasteners
in total with 170 of which marked as partially occluded.
There are 24 regions marked as uninspectable since the
clip is fully obscured and 44 missing fasteners (2.95% of
inspectable samples) were found in the dataset. All of the
fasteners in the dataset were of e-clip type. The fastener
region estimation method and the missing fastener detection
method were evaluated separately.
A. Fastener Region Estimation
The purpose of this experiment is to evaluate our proposed
fastener region estimation method. Precision, recall, and F1
score are used to evaluate the performance of the estimation.
 Proc. of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (IEEE ICSIPA 2017), Malaysia,
September 12-14, 2017

TABLE I: Performance of the proposed fastener region

estimation method.
Precision Recall F1 score Search Area Reduced
91.53% 81.82% 86.40% 71.37%

(a) (b) (c) (d)

Another metrics used in evaluation is the search area reduced
by the region estimation step.
The number of true positives, false negatives, and false
positives, are counted from 1) fastener areas detected by the
method, 2) fasteners that are not detected, and 3) detected
areas without a fastener, respectively. F1 score is defined as
the harmonic mean of recall and precision.
It should be noted that as our region estimation method
is meant to be used for reducing the search space in each
(e) (f) (g) (h)
image for the next missing fastener detection step. A region
estimation result is counted as a true positive when it covers Fig. 9: Example images cropped from the original dataset
more than 95% of the area of the fastener bounding box. for the evaluation of missing fastener detectors. Negative
Table I shows the performance of our method. Our samples (intact fasteners) are shown in (a) to (d) and positive
proposed method results in the precision, recall and F1 score samples (missing fasteners) are shown in (e) to (h).
of 91.53%, 81.82%, and 86.40% respectively while the area
to be searched is reduced by 71.37% on average (fastener
bounding boxes consume on average of 5.33% of the area of
each image). The method took 269 milliseconds per image in
our testing environment of an Intel Core i7-5500U processor
with 8GB DDR3 RAM. From our inspection, the proposed
method works well on images without major occlusions on
the tie area as this condition is against the assumption behind
our method that the tie areas contain less edge density than
the other areas.

B. Missing Fastener Detection

(a) ROC curve (b) Recall, precision and F1 score
In this experiment, the dataset we used to evaluate the
classifier was cropped from each region where fasteners are Fig. 10: Performance metrics of the proposed missing fas-
expected from the original dataset. Examples of intact and tener detector at different threshold values.
missing fasteners in this new dataset are shown in Fig. 9. The
regions are padded with a random margin on every side to
imitate possible results from the fastener region estimation as they show how much human effort is required to correct
step in which the located fastener might not be at the center the misclassified samples.
of the bounding box. As indicated in table III, the proposed method achieved
We have tested our missing fastener detection method the optimal F1 score of 75.47% in missing fastener de-
using 3-fold cross-validation. The dataset is divided into tection. Recall, precision, and F1 scores of the proposed
three parts and three iterations of testing are performed with classifier at different thresholds is also shown in Fig. 10b. It
one part of the dataset as the test set and the others combined can be observed from the table that the use of guided filter
as the training set. The final performance measures are (GF) and image pyramid technique in PHOG improved the
calculated from the measures from each iteration. F1 score by 5.10% and 3.91% respectively. The use of RBF
In our experiment, we calculated the performance mea- kernel also significantly increased the F1 score by 15.01%.
sures for the missing fastener detection problem i.e. images In addition, if the images with partially occluded fasteners
with a missing fastener were considered positive samples are not considered in the evaluation, our classifier achieved
and images with intact fasteners as negative samples. the F1 score of 96.70% in missing fastener detection.
The ROC curve of the proposed missing fastener detection
method is shown in Fig. 10a and the probability of detection TABLE II: Probability of detection and probability of false
(PD) and probability of false alarm (PFA) of the missing alarm of the classifiers for missing fastener detection.
fastener detectors are shown in table II.
Method PD PFA
Precision, recall, and F1 score are also used as the
performance metrics for this missing fastener detection as GF-PHOG-SVR
100.00% 3.47%
(The Proposed Method)
they are considered more suitable for this particular problem
GF-HOG-SVR 97.73% 2.43%
in which the dataset is highly imbalanced. We can see from
PHOG-SVR 100.00% 3.88%
the definition of precision and recall that for this task, they
reflect the performance of the classifier in practical use better GF-PHOG-linear SVR 97.73% 8.80%

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 Proc. of the 2017 IEEE International Conference on Signal and Image Processing Applications (IEEE ICSIPA 2017), Malaysia,
September 12-14, 2017
TABLE III: Missing fastener detection performance of dif-
ferent classification methods.
Method Precision Recall F1
GF-PHOG-SVR
64.52% 90.91% 75.47%
(The Proposed Method)
GF-HOG-SVR 60.00% 88.63% 71.56%
PHOG-SVR 59.38% 86.36% 70.37%
GF-PHOG-linear SVR 61.90% 59.09% 60.47%
However, one disadvantage of using RBF kernel in the
proposed method is that the computation time is high. The
proposed method took on average of 2.7 seconds per image
whereas the SVR classifier with linear kernel only took
on average of 0.86 seconds per image. Fortunately, the
reduction in computation time can be expected in practical
settings of an inspection system in which the position of the
camera will be fixed, causing the search space to be easily
and significantly reduced.
Examples of detection results are shown in Fig. 11. It
can be said that while the classifier is robust to a degree of
occlusions and texture variations, it does not work well in
images with major occlusions and texture irregularities.
VII. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, we have presented a method for automat-
ically detecting missing rail fasteners from images. First,
a coarse fastener region estimation method based on edge
density map and RANSAC is performed in order to lessen
the search space for the fine detection of fasteners. Then, the
missing fastener detection method based on PHOG features
and -SVR are applied to the region obtained from the region
estimation step. Guided filter is also used to smooth the
texture of rail fasteners before further processing. Our testing
has shown that the proposed classifier is robust to a degree of
occlusions and variance in texture of the fastener observed
in complex real-world environment.
Future work includes improving the method to better
handle scenes with major occlusions and texture anomalies.
Performance optimization is also needed to make the algo-
rithm able to work in real time.
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(a) (b) (c) (d)
(e) (f) (g) (h)
(i) (j) (k) (l)
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