September-October 2022 - 32

Rail Trespassing Prevention
safety compliance around rail
property, there is a growing understanding
of where and how
useful data can be collected. A
group of researchers from Rutgers
University is looking beyond
injury and fatality data and has
developed a way to account for
all trespassing occurrences, including
near miss incidents and
events where there are no injuries.
The Rutgers team is looking to
improve understanding of trespassing
trends by utilizing the
vast amount of video railroads
have and glean insight through
artificial intelligence (AI).
The FRA-funded research uses
an AI driven computer vision system
that analyzes video and collects
several key pieces of information
on all trespassing events
occurring at a given location.
" [We had a hypothesis] that
there were many more of these
types of trespassing events or violation
events occurring, but they
just weren't recorded because no
one is looking at this big video
data and we also thought that
AI could tackle this challenge, "
Asim F. Zaman, project engineer
at Rutgers, said during his presentation
at the American Railway
Engineering and Maintenance of
Way Association annual meeting
held in Denver, Colo., in August.
The initial research involved
two grade-crossings in urban New
Jersey and less urban Ashland, Va.
Researchers set up a camera aimed
at the grade crossing, determined
a region of interest, which appears
as a green bounding box in a video
stream, selected signals to monitor
and began AI monitoring.
The crossings were observed
during a 13-month timeframe,
which produced more than 38,000
hours of live AI analysis with information
collected on time, date,
the type of infraction, trajectory
and several other points on more
than 25,000 violation events.
From the data set produced,
researchers were able to identify
trends, which Zaman explains all
tie into the " three E " approach for
safety enhancement: engineering,
education and enforcement.
For example, Zaman noted
in his presentation that the New
Federal Railroad Administration
A TEAM of Rutgers
University
researchers
undertook an FRAfunded
research
demonstration
project to develop
an AI-aided trespassing
detection
system. The initial
research focused
on crossings in
New Jersey and
Virginia.
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September-October 2022

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