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ABSTRACT
In recent days the collisions between wildlife and railway have increased causing a very vital
loss to the fauna. There have been huge numbers of deaths of elephants while crossing the railway
tracks and the deaths have increased in the recent days and it has caused a serious problem. The main
cause of death is there are no early warning systems which can give an early information regarding
their location. Thus our main objective will be to provide an early warning system to the railway
department so they can act accordingly. Our automated elephant tracker is a system developed with a
motive of saving this elephants and to provide an early warning regarding their location. It consists
of a manual bot capable of running on rough terrains. It tracks a fixed area but at the same time can
also be manually controlled according to the circumstances. It has a wireless camera mounted on it
which leads visualization of the elephants and provides early information to the base station
regarding the locations and detections of this elephants. The main job of the base station is to control
our elephant tracker and at the same time to process the signal to detect the location of elephant.
Accordingly it sends the information to the railway authorities to take according steps. Which can
minimize the collision and ensure the safety of the elephants and railway system
.
Keywords: Aforge, Arduino, C#, Euclidean, WPF.
1. INTRODUCTION
Automated elephant tracker is a system developed with the motive to save elephants from
deaths by speeding trains. The system is developed by incorporating 3 major systems.
1.1: Manual + Autonomous bot
A manual bot named Black etrack v1.0.0.1 will compose the first major part of the system.
The manual bot can move through rugged terrains near a railway track. It has two modes of
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International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN 0976
6464(Print), ISSN 0976 6472(Online), Volume 6, Issue 1, January (2015), pp. 17-22 IAEME
operation. Manual and automatic. The BET gets it power from a series of four 9V batteries. It attains
mobility through 4 wide wheels. It receives signal from the base station and it transmits the signal to
the base station by a wireless camera. The bot gets recharged from jumper stations (Charging points)
at regular intervals.
1.2: Wireless A/V camera
A wireless A/V camera is used to transfer the image from the field to the Base Station. The
wireless camera captures the image and then it send it to the Base Station by the transmitter. The
camera is relatively of 5x5 sq. cms.
1.3: Base Station
A Base station is the key part to the system. The base station performs the set of tasks
mentioned below in a hierarchal way.
1. Control the BET.
2. Receive the signal in video format from the camera
3. Process the video such that it can detect elephants using colour recognition and size
recognition.
4. If detected send a signal to the train drivers to slow down.
2. FACTS AND FIGURES OF ELEPHANT DEATHS CAUSED BY SPEEDING TRAINS
2.1: Deadly Tracks
The 21st century has seen a rapid growth of population like never before. India, the second
largest populated country in the world, in particular has seen a rise in demand regarding economical
and quick transportation systems. India's railway network being among the biggest in the world, is
constantly spreading itself in order to increase the connectivity between remote locations thus,
fulfilling the requirement of the teeming millions. But, while doing so, most of us fail to realize its
impact on the biota. We fail to realize that we aren't alone on this planet & that there are millions of
other species trying to make their living along with us. Instead of sharing our bread with them, we
tend to be ignorant about them and are always on the run to prove ourselves as the most intelligent
species on the planet. As a result of our in-human behaviour, these poor creatures (both big & small);
hardly able to decipher the complexities of human nature, have to pay a heavy price, which may
sometimes lead to their own death. With reference to the state's affidavit (state of West Bengal) there
have been, 57 elephants have died in train hits in the past 19 years. In spite of repeated warnings and
law enforcements, the railways have failed to prevent loss of lives in the elephant corridors, which is
quite evident from the statistical data we see.
2.2: An excerpt from national daily, The Telegraph, 14th November, 2013
A railway official today said that, the Jaipur-KamakhyaKabiguru Express, which mowed
down five elephants in the Chapramari forest, was running at 80-100kmph, which is double or more
the speed allowed when trains travel through forests. Since 2002, when the railway tracks between
Siliguri Junction and Alipurduar were converted to broad gauge, 40 elephants have died in train
accidents. A study by the WWF shows that most of the Human Elephant conflict occurs in the forest
border areas. So our main area of concentration are the forest border areas.
3. HARDWARE MODULE
The hardware of this system mainly consists of the bot. The bot is the main field player. It
can be manually (remotely) controlled or automatically controlled. Based on it, the hardware inside
the bot consists of the following parts.
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International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN 0976
6464(Print), ISSN 0976 6472(Online), Volume 6, Issue 1, January (2015), pp. 17-22 IAEME
Name
Specifications
Quantity
4
2
1
1
1
1
4
The bot is controlled by RF network operating in 2.5 GHz frequency range. The robot is built
on an open source multipurpose chassis. The chassis contains spots for 6 motors, 1 castor wheel, 1
line sensor array, and being an open source, it can be fitted with almost any type of components. The
BET is driven by a 4 wheel drive and it follows a differential drive steering system. The differential
drive steering system works on the principal of difference of motor speeds.
4. SOFTWARE MODULE
The software is mainly divided into two units. The first unit comprises the controlling unit
while the later comprises of the processing unit which deals with the image processing part.
4.1: Black e Track controller
The Black e Track controller is the controlling unit of the bot. It sends control to the BET by
serial port communication using a RF network of 2.4GHz. The signal on the other hand is interpreted
by the receiver and the serial data is transferred to the Arduino Leonardo Board. The Arduino
Leonardo Board sends the signal to the motor driver circuit to perform the desired operation. The
Black e Track controller has 15 buttons.
Si no
Name of the
control
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Front_fast
Back_fast
Right_fast
Left_fast
Stop
Front_slow
Back_slow
Right_slow
Left_slow
Connect
11
Disconnect
12
13
14
15
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International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN 0976
6464(Print), ISSN 0976 6472(Online), Volume 6, Issue 1, January (2015), pp. 17-22 IAEME
The Black e Track Controller v1.0.0.1 is developed in Visual Studio 2013 using .NET
framework v 4.5.1 in C# and xaml. It contains a status box where the current command is displayed.
There are 3 progress bars. When the progress bar is in the intermediate stage, the corresponding set
of commands is executed. In the controller, the Press to activate keyboard controls button activates
the keyboard commands. The keyboard commands are mentioned in a tabular format below.
Si No
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
Keyboard keys
Commands executed
W
A
S
D
Numpad 8
Numpad 2
Numpad 4
Numpad 6
Fast forward
Fast left turn
Fast backward
Fast right turn
Slow forward
Slow Backward
Slow left turn
Slow right turn
Another button named Activate button is a special purpose security button. A field exist
where you need to enter the password. By default the password is 12345. Unless you press the
activate button after entering the password, all the controls go in the disabled stage. Only after
entering the password and pressing the activate button, the controls can be enabled.
International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN 0976
6464(Print), ISSN 0976 6472(Online), Volume 6, Issue 1, January (2015), pp. 17-22 IAEME
Euclidean color extractor filter: This filter is available in Aforge.NET framework. This filter
utilises two major parameters to extract a certain color. The parameters includes the RGB values for
the filters base color and the other parameter includes the size in pixels around the centre color. The
filter filters pixels, which color is inside/outside of RGB sphere with specified centre and radius - it
keeps pixels with colors inside/outside of the specified sphere and fills the rest with specified color.
The filter accepts 24 and 32 bpp color images for processing.
Fig 3: Image after applying the filer. Note: only the areas with red color remains. Picture curtsey:
www.aforgenet.com
Thus from the illustration 3, it is clear that the centre part of the rose image is filtered out. In
the case of EIDS, the centre color is roughly the average color of an elephant. In the EIDS system, an
option exist for the change of the centre color but it isnt there in EIDS v1.0.0.1 It will be available
under v1.0.0.2. Please note that the Euclidean colouring filter is probably one of the most basic way
to approach the detection of elephants.
Blob class filter: The use of the blob class is simply to highlight the extracted region
extracted by the Euclidean colouring filter. In EIDS v1.0.0.1, there is an added facility where if a
blob is displayed in the source image, then the word DETECTED is also displayed in red colour
over the button right corner of the source image.
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International Journal of Electronics and Communication Engineering & Technology (IJECET), ISSN 0976
6464(Print), ISSN 0976 6472(Online), Volume 6, Issue 1, January (2015), pp. 17-22 IAEME
5.
Websites
http://www.aforgenet.com.
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