Accident Prevention Technology at a Level Crossing

The safety equipments of railway level crossing which are installed at intersections between roads and railway lines prevent level crossing accidents by informing all of the vehicles and pedestrians of approaching trains. The intelligent safety system for level crossing which employs information and communication technology has been developed in USA and Japan, etc. But, in Korea, the relevant research has not been performed. In this paper, we analyze the cause of railway level crossing accidents and the inherent problem of the existing safety equipments. Based on analyzed results, we design the intelligent safety system which prevent collision between a train and a vehicle. This system displays train approaching information in real-time at roadside warning devices, informs approaching train of the detected obstacle in crossing areas, and is interconnected with traffic signal to empty the crossing area before train comes. Especially, we present the video based obstacle detection algorithm and verify its performance with prototype H/W since the abrupt obstacles in crossing areas are the main cause of level crossing accidents. We identify that the presented scheme detects both pedestrian and vehicle with good performance.

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