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For safety purposes, railroad tracks need to be inspected on a regular basis for physical defects or design noncompliances. Such track defects and non-compliances, if not detected in a timely manner, may eventually lead to grave consequences such as train derailments. In this paper, we present a real-time automatic vision-based rail inspection system, with main focus on anchors - an important rail component type, and anchor-related rail defects, or exceptions. Our system robustly detects important rail components including ties, tie plates, anchors with high accuracy and efficiency. Detected objects are then consolidated across video frames and across camera views to map to physical rail objects, by combining the video data streams from all camera views with GPS information and speed information from the distance measuring instrument (DMI). After these rail components are detected and consolidated, further …