Railway Artificial Intelligence Learning Benchmark (RAIL-BENCH): A Benchmark Suite for Perception in the Railway Domain

arXiv:2604.22507v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark suites are crucial for advancing computer vision research, providing not only curated datasets but also standardized evaluation protocols for reproducible comparison. The railway domain lacks such resources, hindering progress in automated train operation. To address this gap, we present RAIL-BENCH, the first perception benchmark suite designed specifically for railways. RAIL-BENCH comprises five challenges - rail track detection, object detection, vegetation segmentation, multi-object tracking, and monocular visual odometry - each tailored to railway-specific characteristics and including a curated dataset from diverse real-world scenarios, evaluation metrics, and public scoreboards; we demonstrate the first three challenges in this paper. We further introduce LineAP, a novel segment-based average precision metric for rail track detection that decouples geometric accuracy from instance-level grouping and employs a track-width-based distance threshold approximating a fixed real-world distance, addressing key limitations of existing line detection metrics. Our benchmark suite is publicly available at https://www.mrt.kit.edu/railbench/.