RailGoerl24: Görlitz Rail Test Center CV Dataset 2024

Driverless train operation for open tracks on urban guided transport and mainline railways requires, among other things automatic detection of actual and potential obstacles, especially humans, in the danger zone of the train's path. Machine learning algorithms have proven to be powerful state-of-the-art tools for this task. However, these algorithms require large amounts of high-quality annotated data containing human beings in railway-specific environments as training data. Unfortunately, the amount of publicly available datasets is not yet sufficient and is significantly inferior to the datasets in the road domain. Therefore, this paper presents RailGoerl24, an on-board visual light Full HD camera dataset of 12205 frames recorded in a railway test center of T\"UV S\"UD Rail, in G\"orlitz, Germany. Its main purpose is to support the development of driverless train operation for guided transport. RailGoerl24 also includes a terrestrial LiDAR scan covering parts of the area used to acquire the RGB data. In addition to the raw data, the dataset contains 33556 boxwise annotations in total for the object class 'person'. The faces of recorded actors are not blurred or altered in any other way. RailGoerl24, soon available at data.fid-move.de/dataset/railgoerl24, can also be used for tasks beyond collision prediction.

Converting Depth Images and Point Clouds for Feature-based Pose Estimation

In recent years, depth sensors have become more and more affordable and have found their way into a growing amount of robotic systems. However, mono- or multi-modal sensor registration, often a necessary step for further processing, faces many challenges on raw depth images or point clouds. This paper presents a method of converting depth data into images capable of visualizing spatial details that are basically hidden in traditional depth images. After noise removal, a neighborhood of points forms two normal vectors whose difference is encoded into this new conversion. Compared to Bearing Angle images, our method yields brighter, higher-contrast images with more visible contours and more details. We tested feature-based pose estimation of both conversions in a visual odometry task and RGB-D SLAM. For all tested features, AKAZE, ORB, SIFT, and SURF, our new Flexion images yield better results than Bearing Angle images and show great potential to bridge the gap between depth data and classical computer vision. Source code is available here: https://rlsch.github.io/depth-flexion-conversion.