Information Technology Journal1812-56381812-5646Asian Network for Scientific Information10.3923/itj.2014.2611.2618PuYong-RenChenLi-WeiLeeSu-Hsing1220141316This study is designed to develop an advanced safety system
that is able to detect the existence of moving obstacles at a railway crossing.
In a miniature railway crossing, scaled 1:22.5, the authors installed a grayscale
CCD camera and developed a graphical user interface to process the images of
the crossing. To achieve this goal, the software was programmed to perform several
image processing techniques such as image subtraction, binarization, morphological
transformation and segmentation to track down the moving obstacles. In addition,
portions of the monitored image around the rails were labeled as alert and alarm
zones where detected obstacles would trigger the sirens of this system. Under
various lighting conditions for the model cars with different colors in the
indoor environment, the experiments on the developed system demonstrated that
the level of illuminance was a significant factor affecting the average alert
accuracy rate but the color of cars was not. Overall, the average alert accuracy
rate reached 97.8%. The promising results of the system’s capability to recognize
obstacles that might pose threats, merit pursuit of full-scale development at
railway crossing sites to provide effective protection against previously undetected,
now preventable incidents.]]>Cunliffe, J.P.,1999Prof. Saf.: J. Am. Soc. Saf. Eng.,442426Gonzalez, J.F.V., J.L.L. Galilea, M.M. Quintas and C.A.L. Vazquez,2008Sens. Lett.,6690698Gonzalez, R.C. and R.E.Woods,2007Digital Image Processing.3rd Edn.,Pages: 976Pages: 976Kim, G., J. Baek, H. Jo, K. Lee and J. Lee,2012Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery,2012pp: 29092913Kim, Z. and T.E. Cohn,2004IEEE Trans. Int. Trans. Syst.,5319324Ku, B.Y.,2010IEEE Veh. Technol. Mag.,57581Lei, Y. and H. Xiao,2011Proceedings of the International Conference on Remote Sensing, Environment and Transportation Engineering,2011pp: 33743376Lohmeier, S.P., R. Rajaraman and V.C. Ramasami,2002Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Sensors, Volume 2,2002pp: 17621766Mockel, S., F. Scherer and P.F. Schuster,2003Proceedings of the IEEE Intelligent Vehicles Symposium,2003pp: 4246Narayanan, A.H., P. Brennan, R. Benjamin, N. Mazzino, G. Bochetti and A. Lancia,2011Proceedings of the European Radar Conference,2011pp: 5760National Instruments Corporation,2005IMAQ vision concepts manual.2005Oorni, R.,2014IET Intell. Transport Syst.,8920Salmane, H., L. Khoudour and Y. Ruichek,2013Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Rail Transportation,2013pp: 179184Sato, K., H. Arai, T. Shimizu and M. Takada,1998Proceedings of the International Conference on Developments in Mass Transit Systems,1998pp: 190195Silar, Z. and M. Dobrovolny,2013Proceedings of the International Conference on IT Convergence and Security,2013pp: 14Takeda, T.,1999Proceedings of the IEEE/IEEJ/JSAI International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems,1999pp: 139141Watanabe, M., K. Okazaki, J. Fukae, N. Tamiya, N. Ueda and M. Nagashima,2002Proceedings of the IEEE MTT-S International Conference on Microwave Symposium Digest, Volume 2,2002pp: 791794Wei, C.P., Y.M. Huang, Y.C.F. Wang and M.Y. Shih,2013Proceedings of the 2nd Asian Conference on Pattern Recognition,2013pp: 702706Yoda, I., K. Sakaue and D. Hosotani,2006Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision Systems,2006pp: 51Zhang, Z.G., X.F. Li and Y.L. Gan,2014Proceedings of the 26th Chinese Control and Decision Conference,2014pp: 50455048