Method and system for railway obstacle detection based on rail segmentation

A system for rails and obstacles detection, the system comprising:

• at least one imaging sensor installed one a locomotive of a train to face a direction of travel of the train, to obtain a plurality of image frames;
• a rails and switches states detection (RSSD) module comprising a RSSD neural network (RSSD NN), the RSSD module is configured to:
• determine, for each image frame of a subset of the plurality of image frames, an input data structure comprising the respective image frame and a history element, wherein the history element comprises a segmentation mask prediction determined for an image frame preceding to the respective image frame;
• and
• determine, based on the input data structure of each of the image frames of the subset and using the RSSD NN, a segmentation mask prediction of the respective image frame, wherein the segmentation mask prediction comprises at least a current railway path along which the train travels.