EAAI Journal 2026 Journal Article
A few-shot enhancement method for railway foreign object detection using sample generation and transfer learning
- Hang Yu
- Zhiwei Cao
- Yong Qin
- Tiantao Xu
- Tao Jing
- Zhenlin Wei
—Foreign object detection is one of the most important parts to ensure the safety of railway operation. With the development of artificial intelligence (AI) technology, deep learning-based methods for railway foreign object detection have made great progress. However, their detection performance degrades substantially when there is a lack of sufficient training samples. To overcome this problem, we propose a few-shot enhancement method for railway foreign object detection using sample generation and transfer learning (FS-RFOD). First, we propose a few-shot object detection framework, which can effectively improve the accuracy of foreign object detection in railway scenarios. Second, we construct a railway few-shot dataset, using foreign object generation and image style transfer methods for data enhancement. Third, a novel three-stage transfer learning method is proposed to enhance the few-shot object detection effect. Experimental results demonstrate that FS-RFOD outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms with the mean average precision at 0. 5 intersection over union (mAP50) and Recall of railway few-shot foreign object detection reaching 85. 4 % and 84. 0 %, respectively.