Generative Model-Driven Synthetic Training Image Generation: An Approach to Cognition in Rail Defect Detection

Recent advancements in cognitive computing, with the integration of deep learning techniques, have facilitated the development of intelligent cognitive systems (ICS). This is particularly beneficial in the context of rail defect detection, where the ICS would emulate human-like analysis of image data for defect patterns. Despite the success of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) in visual defect classification, the scarcity of large datasets for rail defect detection remains a challenge due to infrequent accident events that would result in defective parts and images. Contemporary researchers have addressed this data scarcity challenge by exploring rule-based and generative data augmentation models. Among these, Variational Autoencoder (VAE) models can generate realistic data without extensive baseline datasets for noise modeling. This study proposes a VAE-based synthetic image generation technique for rail defects, incorporating weight decay regularization and image reconstruction loss to prevent overfitting. The proposed method is applied to create a synthetic dataset for the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) with just 50 real samples across five classes. Remarkably, 500 synthetic samples are generated with a minimal reconstruction loss of 0.021. A Visual Transformer (ViT) model underwent fine-tuning using this synthetic CPR dataset, achieving high accuracy rates (98%-99%) in classifying the five defect classes. This research offers a promising solution to the data scarcity challenge in rail defect detection, showcasing the potential for robust ICS development in this domain.

Deep Anomaly Detection for Time-series Data in Industrial IoT: A Communication-Efficient On-device Federated Learning Approach

Since edge device failures (i.e., anomalies) seriously affect the production of industrial products in Industrial IoT (IIoT), accurately and timely detecting anomalies is becoming increasingly important. Furthermore, data collected by the edge device may contain the user's private data, which is challenging the current detection approaches as user privacy is calling for the public concern in recent years. With this focus, this paper proposes a new communication-efficient on-device federated learning (FL)-based deep anomaly detection framework for sensing time-series data in IIoT. Specifically, we first introduce a FL framework to enable decentralized edge devices to collaboratively train an anomaly detection model, which can improve its generalization ability. Second, we propose an Attention Mechanism-based Convolutional Neural Network-Long Short Term Memory (AMCNN-LSTM) model to accurately detect anomalies. The AMCNN-LSTM model uses attention mechanism-based CNN units to capture important fine-grained features, thereby preventing memory loss and gradient dispersion problems. Furthermore, this model retains the advantages of LSTM unit in predicting time series data. Third, to adapt the proposed framework to the timeliness of industrial anomaly detection, we propose a gradient compression mechanism based on Top-\textit{k} selection to improve communication efficiency. Extensive experiment studies on four real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed framework can accurately and timely detect anomalies and also reduce the communication overhead by 50\% compared to the federated learning framework that does not use a gradient compression scheme.