Detection and Recognition of Tilted Characters on Railroad Wagon Wheelsets Based on Deep Learning

The quality of railroad wheelsets is an important guarantee for the safe operation of wagons, and mastering the production information of wheelsets plays a vital role in vehicle scheduling and railroad transportation safety. However, when using objection detection methods to detect the production information of wheelsets, there are situations that affect detection such as character tilting and unfixed position. Therefore, this paper proposes a deep learning-based method for accurately detecting and recognizing tilted character information on railroad wagon wheelsets. It covers three parts. Firstly, we construct a tilted character detection network based on Faster RCNN for generating a wheelset’s character candidate regions. Secondly, we design a tilted character correction network to classify and correct the orientation of flipped characters. Finally, a character recognition network is constructed based on convolutional recurrent neural network (CRNN) to realize the task of recognizing a wheelset’s characters. The result shows that the method can quickly and effectively detect and identify the information of tilted characters on wheelsets in images.