Block Sparse Low-rank Matrix Decomposition based Visual Defect Inspection of Rail Track Surfaces

Low-rank matrix decomposition has shown its capability in many applications such as image in-painting, de-noising, background reconstruction and defect detection etc. In this paper, we consider the texture background of rail track images and the sparse foreground of the defects to construct a low-rank matrix decomposition model with block sparsity for defect inspection of rail tracks, which jointly minimizes the nuclear norm and the 2-1 norm. Similar to ADM, an alternative method is proposed in this study to solve the optimization problem. After image decomposition, the defect areas in the resulting low-rank image will form dark stripes that horizontally cross the entire image, indicating the preciselocations of the defects. Finally, a two-stage defect extraction method is proposed to locate the defect areas. The experimental results of the two datasets show that our algorithm achieved better performance compared with other methods.