AVerMedia and Ignitarium Launch an AI-driven Airborne Railway Track Inspection System .

AVerMedia is a multinational company which specializes in hardware for image capturing and video transmission. Together with Ignitarium, a top-class AI software provider, it announced the launch of a new class of aircraft-based railway track anomaly detection solutions, for the Railroad maintenance industry across the globe.

The first step for accurate anomaly detection  is the ability to capture the artifacts of interest on a precised and accurate note, compensating for the aircraft pitch, roll and yaw. Ignitarium’s Dynamic Camera Alignment software runs on the AVerMedia Box PC EX731-AAH2-2AC0 (with an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module inside). It helps capturing high quality video of every rail track related object-of-interest. The object of interest is perfectly “centered” in each captured frame. This follows analysis of the captured frames by Ignitarium’s TYQ-i™ Defect Detection software platform. This generates a detailed report of the defect which includes cracked ties, skewed ties, damaged plates, missing spikes etc. It saves a lot of time without disrupting any train-running schedule.

Sujeeth Joseph, Chief Product Officer at Ignitarium said “Ignitarium has a rich history of developing advanced Vision-AI algorithms for anomaly detection. Infrastructure analytics, in particular, has been a growth area for us in recent years. We are extremely pleased with our collaboration with US-based Skycam Aviation Inc., whose state of the art fixed-wing aircraft based image acquisition platform served as the vehicle for deployment of our high precision rail-track defect detection software. As our hardware provider, AVerMedia’s Box PC portfolio (based on NVIDIA’s Jetson TX2 and Xavier AGX modules) has proved to be a reliable computing platform for these demanding use cases”.

Ignitarium  uses an AI-based TYQ-i™ defect detection platform which can address multiple defects varying from industries to transportation, food, footwear, automotive, solar etc. Currently it is deploying aerial-based analytics solutions for  high value assets like power transmission towers, cellular towers, roads, canals, pipelines, bridges, solar farms, construction sites, and buildings.

Skycam CTO, Christopher Dombrowski said that Skycam Aviation is pivotal for transformation of manual-labor intensive workflows to highly automated methodologies. Their unique ability to schedule and operate aircrafts with advanced imaging systems has helped the customers in maintaining a high value of their assets at the most budge-table price. Together with Ignitarium, they have integrated highly advanced AI-driven algorithms for image acquisition pipeline to deliver the best solutions for anomaly detection in rail-tracks and other infrastructural assets.

AVerMedia’s EX731-AAH2-2AC0 Box PC is equipped with NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module and 2x 4Kp30 capture cards which helps in the analysis of dual 4Kp30 video inputs. It also ahs 2x M.2 Key M 2280 slots which supports 2x AVerMedia’s M.2 capture cards,  and CN311-H, for capturing 2x 4Kp30 video inputs. The two M.2 slots also support SSD for video recording applications. The Box PC has a customized active cooling system. Notably one of the best compact application-ready systems to support the NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module for capturing dual 4Kp30 video inputs and at the same time running the edge computing algorithms for high-end video analysis application markets.