The hard equation of railway safety versus the high commercial profits can only be achieved through the use of new inspection methods supported by modern technologies. The track and its components can have different types of troubles, such as rail surface defects, broken sleepers, missing fasteners, and irregular ballast levels. Each component of the track infrastructure plays a significant role, where the failure or the absence of any of them can pave the way to undesired situations. The rail is designed to carry and direct the train, the sleepers are meant to maintain the level of the rail, and the ballast mission is to keep all components floating on the surface of the ground. The fasteners are used to fasten the rail to the sleepers, and therefore too many missing fasteners can lead to sever unsteady tracks, which can, in turn, result in derailment. Therefore, there is a high demand for advanced inspection methods to monitor the railway track and its components continuously. The presence of such advanced inspection models would help the railway industry avoid obstacles such as high operation and maintenance costs, dangerous accidents, and uncomfortable passenger's experience.   This master thesis aims to present an efficient method to classify the track and its components by combining image processing techniques and deep learning algorithms. This method was able to detect the missing fasteners in the set of images captured by a line camera, continuously monitoring the rail and its associated fasteners. The experimental results obtained in this thesis showed that the proposed method is efficient and robust for detecting the track and its components in complex environments. The thesis also discusses the idea of building one complete model that can process and classify all track components at once. The image processing technique was employed to extract different components of the track, individually: fasteners, rail, ballast, and sleepers. The model was trained and used to classify the state of the fasteners. Classification of other components of the track will be a part of the future work.

Enhanced vision and object detection could be useful in the aviation domain in situations of bad weather or cluttered environments. In particular, enhanced vision and object detection could improve situational awareness and aid the pilot in environment interpretation and detection of hazardous objects. The fundamental concept of object detection is to interpret what objects are present in an image with the aid of a prediction model or other feature extraction techniques. Constructing a comprehensive data set that can describe the operational environment and be robust for weather and lighting conditions is vital if the object detector is to be utilised in the avionics domain. Evaluating the accuracy and robustness of the constructed data set is crucial. Since erroneous detection, referring to the object detection algorithm failing to detect a potentially hazardous object or falsely detecting an object, is a major safety issue. Bayesian uncertainty estimations are evaluated to examine if they can be utilised to detect miss-classifications, enabling the use of a Bayesian Neural Network with the object detector to identify an erroneous detection. The object detector Faster RCNN with ResNet-50-FPN was utilised using the development framework Detectron2; the accuracy of the object detection algorithm was evaluated based on obtained MS-COCO metrics. The setup achieved a 50.327 % AP@[IoU=.5:.95] score. With an 18.1 % decrease when exposed to weather and lighting conditions. By inducing artificial artefacts and augmentations of luminance, motion, and weather to the images of the training set, the AP@[IoU=.5:.95] score increased by 15.6 %. The inducement improved the robustness necessary to maintain the accuracy when exposed to variations of environmental conditions, which resulted in just a 2.6 % decrease from the initial accuracy. To fully conclude that the augmentations provide the necessary robustness for variations in environmental conditions, the model needs to be subjected to actual image representations of the operational environment with different weather and lighting phenomena. Bayesian uncertainty estimations show great promise in providing additional information to interpret objects in the operational environment correctly. Further research is needed to conclude if uncertainty estimations can provide necessary information to detect erroneous predictions.

La croissance exponentielle et les progrès de la technologie ont rendu très pratique le partage de données visuelles, d'images et de données vidéo par le biais d’une vaste prépondérance de platesformes disponibles. Avec le développement rapide des technologies Internet et multimédia, l’efficacité de la gestion et du stockage, la rapidité de transmission et de partage, l'analyse en temps réel et le traitement des ressources multimédias numériques sont progressivement devenus un élément indispensable du travail et de la vie de nombreuses personnes. Sans aucun doute, une telle croissance technologique a rendu le forgeage de données visuelles relativement facile et réaliste sans laisser de traces évidentes. L'abus de ces données falsifiées peut tromper le public et répandre la désinformation parmi les masses. Compte tenu des faits mentionnés ci-dessus, la criminalistique des images doit être utilisée pour authentifier et maintenir l'intégrité des données visuelles. Pour cela, nous proposons une technique de détection passive de falsification d'images basée sur les incohérences de texture et de bruit introduites dans une image du fait de l'opération de falsification. De plus, le réseau de détection de falsification d'images (IFD-Net) proposé utilise une architecture basée sur un réseau de neurones à convolution (CNN) pour classer les images comme falsifiées ou vierges. Les motifs résiduels de texture et de bruit sont extraits des images à l'aide du motif binaire local (LBP) et du modèle Noiseprint. Les images classées comme forgées sont ensuite utilisées pour mener des expériences afin d'analyser les difficultés de localisation des pièces forgées dans ces images à l'aide de différents modèles de segmentation d'apprentissage en profondeur. Les résultats expérimentaux montrent que l'IFD-Net fonctionne comme les autres méthodes de détection de falsification d'images sur l'ensemble de données CASIA v2.0. Les résultats discutent également des raisons des difficultés de segmentation des régions forgées dans les images du jeu de données CASIA v2.0. / The exponential growth and advancement of technology have made it quite convenient for people to share visual data, imagery, and video data through a vast preponderance of available platforms. With the rapid development of Internet and multimedia technologies, performing efficient storage and management, fast transmission and sharing, real-time analysis, and processing of digital media resources has gradually become an indispensable part of many people’s work and life. Undoubtedly such technological growth has made forging visual data relatively easy and realistic without leaving any obvious visual clues. Abuse of such tampered data can deceive the public and spread misinformation amongst the masses. Considering the facts mentioned above, image forensics must be used to authenticate and maintain the integrity of visual data. For this purpose, we propose a passive image forgery detection technique based on textural and noise inconsistencies introduced in an image because of the tampering operation. Moreover, the proposed Image Forgery Detection Network (IFD-Net) uses a Convolution Neural Network (CNN) based architecture to classify the images as forged or pristine. The textural and noise residual patterns are extracted from the images using Local Binary Pattern (LBP) and the Noiseprint model. The images classified as forged are then utilized to conduct experiments to analyze the difficulties in localizing the forged parts in these images using different deep learning segmentation models. Experimental results show that both the IFD-Net perform like other image forgery detection methods on the CASIA v2.0 dataset. The results also discuss the reasons behind the difficulties in segmenting the forged regions in the images of the CASIA v2.0 dataset.