Former defense electronics experts have devised a thermal sensor system to detect objects at up to three kilometers.
Israel Railways, in cooperation with Rail Safe, is developing a smart system to detect objects on the tracks in order to improve travel safety. The system, the first in the world of its kind, uses a thermal sensor that can detect objects, classify them in real time, and warn the driver long enough before a collision with the object occurs.
Rail Safe, founded by former employees at Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd. and Elbit Systems Ltd. (Nasdaq: ESLT; TASE: ESLT) subsidiary El-Op, began developing the system 18 months ago, after realizing that all the world’s railway companies needed such a system. The company believes that the potential market for the product amounts to hundreds of millions of dollars a year.
Through 2015, Israel Railways has recorded 12 incidents in which trains hit trespassers (vehicles and pedestrians) on the railway tracks. While the human eye can see only up to 200 meters, the sensor can detect objects up to a distance of three kilometers.
Israel Railways is currently in the midst of a railway electrification project, in which railways will switch from diesel fuel to electric power. T
I can’t see the detection system being of more than marginal value in the wider world. Like the human eye, it won’t see around curves or over the crest of summits. Will a thermal sensor even notice natural objects such as boulders or trees across the track? And most of the time pedestrians and vehicles that may be on or crossing the r-o-w three kilometres (1.8 miles) away will be well clear by the time the train reaches the point, even at 100 mph.
While it can in certain circumstances provide earlier warning of a potential problem, that will only help if action is taken right away to stop the train. Either the trains frequently get delayed by unnecessary slowdowns, or the operators get habituated to the system “crying wolf” like the small boy in the fable.
I think we need more information. The article does not offer any conditions to the maximum detection distance such as the inability to detect around curves. I agree that spotting grade crossing interference over a distance sufficient to stop the train are unlikely to prevent many collisions. Yet this seems to be a preocupation of thinkers who focus on the problem. They see the primary issue as being the fact that trains have a relatively long stopping distance.
Dave will be best qualified to speak to the normal conditions. The article mentions speeds of 75 MPH (current) to 100 MPH (planned). That would indicate a lot of tangent, and not many 5 degree curves.
Under those conditions, I would suspect that the system might be useful.
Again, urban conditions would lessen it’s effectiveness.
How does it tell cars and pedestrians crossing the tracks long before any possibility of a collision from ones that will cause one? How does it detect cars that will drive around the gates at the last second?
From what I gether, this new idea is of particular use on the relatively tangent high speed Jerusalem - Tel Aviv and T. A. Haifa lines, which will be grade-crossing free when construction of the former and modernization on the latter are complete. I think mainly to protect against tresspassing and possibly MofW equiment not recorded into Dispatcher programming. I have no additional technical information on the system beyond what you have read, and on that basis agree it would not seem to be of universal usefulness.
A thermal imager would work best for detecting people when ambient temperatures are 30C or less. At higher temperatures, the imagers would likely rely on motion with respect to the background (this has been done with radars for several decades).
Vehicles or motorized MOW equipment should be easy.