News: The Northeast Frontier Railway has introduced an Intrusion Detection System across its network to protect elephants and support uninterrupted train operations in forested and high-risk wildlife areas.
About Intrusion Detection System to Protect Elephants
- The Intrusion Detection System or IDS is a method to avert train-elephant collision.
- Developed by: Northeast Frontier Railway (NFR) – Headquartered at Guwahati, Assam.
- Objective: To generate real-time alert on the occurrence of safety hazards that might result in accident or serious disaster.
- Working mechanism
- It uses a fibre-optic acoustic sensing mechanism to detect elephant movement on railway tracks in real time.
- When vibrations or external sound waves interact with the Optical Fiber Cable (OFC), variations occur in the reflected light pulses, allowing the system to record a baseline “reference signature”.
- During an intrusion event, the system captures a new vibration signature, compares it with the reference data, performs classification and analysis, and triggers an alert.
- A single IDS unit can monitor approximately 30 to 40 km of railway track continuously and send alarms without range limitations.
- The remote sensing unit communicates with a central server using Ethernet or 4G connectivity.
- Alerts are delivered to the concerned railways personnels through audio-visual signals, geo-location display, and train tracking functions.
- The AI-supported software can also detect rail fractures, track trespassing, unauthorized digging, and landslide risks, enhancing overall railway safety.
