Hybrid Deep Learning Approach for Early Detection of Railway Track Faults to Enhance Railway Safety

Authors

  • Aravindh Balan Freelance Post Doctoral Scholar Project Manager. Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.63282/3050-9246.IJETCSIT-V7I2P138

Keywords:

Railway Track Inspection, Spectrograms, Acoustic Signals, Machine Learning, Fault Diagnosis

Abstract

Railway tracks are the primary infrastructure that allows trains to move and any defect in the railway track can lead to minor or major accidents. Consistent monitoring and condition-based maintenance are crucial for safety and minimizing hazards. In this paper, an automated fault detection system is proposed for railway track fault diagnosis using Hybrid RF+LSTM model based on the Railway Track Fault Detection (RTFD) dataset. Class imbalance is handled by noise removal, normalization, encoding features, and balancing with SMOTE, while the dataset's quality is enhanced. Their proposed hybrid model combines Random Forest and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) to model sequential dependencies, leading to improved classification accuracy. Prior ML and DL models, such as CNN, ResNet-50, and VGG16, are applied for evaluate model's performance. With scores of 98% for accuracy, 96% for precision, 98% for recall, and 97% for F1-score, the Hybrid RF+LSTM model surpasses all other models in the experiments. Research like this lends credence to the idea that the proposed method could greatly enhance railway safety and reliability by making track defects much easier to spot.

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References

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Published

2026-05-20

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Section

Articles

How to Cite

1.
Balan A. Hybrid Deep Learning Approach for Early Detection of Railway Track Faults to Enhance Railway Safety. IJETCSIT [Internet]. 2026 May 20 [cited 2026 Jun. 12];7(2):312-9. Available from: https://www.ijetcsit.org/index.php/ijetcsit/article/view/748

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