Railways are the lifeblood of millions of Indians. You only need to hop on to the Mumbai local to understand how popular and necessary trains are in India. But negligence of infrastructure over the years has unfortunately led to frequent mishaps and accidents.
So researchers from IIT Roorkee have proposed a solution that combines the power of computer vision with drone based technology. Their approach essentially monitors the health of railway tracks to ensure that they meet the compliance standards and more importantly, prevent accidents.
So how does their approach work? As with any machine learning project, it works in several steps:
Below is an image illustrating the technique:
Once the approach was finalized, the researchers then set about testing it on more than thousand images that spanned different weather conditions. The results, shown in the paper (link below), clearly show that this is an effective technique and is not influenced by weather or altitude.
You can read their research paper in full here.
While there has been research in this area using drones previously (also mentioned in the research paper), this novel approach is cost effective and and takes up far less time. The current system being used by the railway authorities is manual, cumbersome and even inconsistent at times. I hope we see a rapid adoption of this technique, which can work alongside the current process to improve and hopefully prevent accidents from happening down the line.
This is a shining example of academia being used to solve a real-life challenge. It serves as an inspiration to all the students and data science enthusiasts that this diverse field has a lot to offer outside of the usual corporate data science work.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit,