A System for Train Condition Monitoring and Structural Health Assessment of Rail Vehicles

The ongoing digitalization of rail systems and the increasing use of artificial intelligence (AI) are fundamentally transforming the design, operation, and maintenance of rail vehicles. While fully automated operation at Grade of Automation 4 (GoA4) is well established in metro systems, its deployment in mainline rail remains limited. This is primarily due to stringent safety requirements and the complexity of open operational environments. Current perception systems based on cameras, radar, and lidar are effective in detecting objects but provide limited capability for reliably identifying impacts, collisions, and driving-over events. This paper presents a novel approach for real-time vehicle condition monitoring and impact detection that integrates structural sensor technologies with AI-based data analysis. The proposed framework addresses three key applications: (1) automated detection of impacts, structural damage, and driving-over events, (2) condition-based maintenance enabled by continuous monitoring, and (3) long-term data analytics to support vehicle design optimization. The results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed approach and highlight its potential to enhance operational safety, enable predictive maintenance strategies, and support the transition toward fully automated operation in mainline rail systems

A GitOps-Driven Annotation Catalog for Fully Automatic Railway Operations

Automatic train operation (ATO) at grade of automation 3 and above (GoA3-GoA4) requires robust AI-based perception systems capable of reliably detecting obstacles and railway-specific objects under real-world conditions. The effectiveness of these modern artificial intelligence approaches depends heavily on large-scale, high-quality, and highly dynamic annotated datasets. However, managing metadata, maintaining provenance, and tracking the iterative evolution of these annotations impose significant infrastructural and regulatory requirements. Existing monolithic data catalogs often suffer from massive operational overhead, poor integration into developer workflows, and severe documentation drift. This paper introduces an innovative, lightweight GitOps-based architecture for metadata management. By leveraging Data-as-Code principles, Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, and Static Site Generation (SSG), the proposed approach establishes a seamless, developer-centric workflow. This ensures an traceability, enforces strict regulatory compliance, and automatically generates a highly performant dataset overview.

A Multi-Sensor Dataset for Monitoring the Operational Environment of Rail Vehicles

Reliable environment monitoring is essential for the safe and efficient operation of automated railway systems, covering all Grades of Automation (GoA), from partially automated (GoA2) to fully automated operation (GoA4). Artificial Intelligence (AI) plays a central role in enabling these systems to detect, classify, and react to potential hazards in real time. The development of such AI-based perception systems requires large volumes of accurately annotated data for training and validation. Within the Digitale Schiene Deutschland (DSD) program, DB InfraGO AG and understandAI GmbH have developed a comprehensive multi- sensor dataset tailored to the needs of railway environment perception. This dataset contains over 7 million high-quality annotations of both railway-specific and general perception objects, captured under varying operational scenarios. The finalized dataset can now be requested at the DB InfraGO AG and serve as a valuable resource for advancing AI-driven environment monitoring in the railway domain.

Railway Artificial Intelligence Learning Benchmark (RAIL-BENCH): A Benchmark Suite for Perception in the Railway Domain

Automated train operation on existing railway infrastructure requires robust camera-based perception, yet the railway domain lacks public benchmark suites with standardized evaluation protocols that would enable reproducible comparison of approaches. We present RAIL-BENCH, the first perception benchmark suite for the railway domain. It comprises five challenges - rail track detection, object detection, vegetation segmentation, multi-object tracking, and monocular visual odometry - each tailored to the specific characteristics of railway environments. RAIL-BENCH provides curated training and test datasets drawn from diverse real-world scenarios, evaluation metrics, and public scoreboards (https://www.mrt.kit.edu/railbench). For the rail track detection challenge we introduce LineAP, a novel segment-based average precision metric that evaluates the geometric accuracy of polyline predictions independently of instance-level grouping, addressing key limitations of existing line detection metrics.

OSDaR23: Open Sensor Data for Rail 2023

For driverless train operation on mainline railways, several tasks need to be implemented by technical systems. One of the most challenging tasks is to monitor the train's driveway and its surroundings for potential obstacles due to long braking distances. Machine learning algorithms can be used to analyze data from vision sensors such as infrared (IR) and visual (RGB) cameras, lidars, and radars to detect objects. Such algorithms require large amounts of annotated data from objects in the rail environment that may pose potential obstacles, as well as rail-specific objects such as tracks or catenary poles, as training data. However, only very few datasets are publicly available and these available datasets typically involve only a limited number of sensors. Datasets and trained models from other domains, such as automotive, are useful but insufficient for object detection in the railway context. Therefore, this publication presents OSDaR23, a multi-sensor dataset of 21 sequences captured in Hamburg, Germany, in September 2021. The sensor setup consisted of multiple calibrated and synchronized IR/RGB cameras, lidars, a radar, and position and acceleration sensors front-mounted on a railway vehicle. In addition to raw data, the dataset contains 204091 polyline, polygonal, rectangle and cuboid annotations for 20 different object classes. This dataset can also be used for tasks going beyond collision prediction, which are listed in this paper.