Back to all cases Harnessing AI for Rail Safety and Efficiency at Prorail
in collaboration with ProRail, BigData Republic uses AI image recognition to make railway inspections faster, safer, and more efficient. Our deep learning models automatically detect railway assets and defects from video footage, cutting the manual inspection workload in half.
The challenge
ProRail collects vast amounts of railway video footage using a video inspection train. Manually inspecting all physical components and assessing the condition of critical assets (such as Insulated Rail Joints / IRJs on busy corridors) is an immense, time-consuming, and error-prone task.
The solution
Together with ProRail, BigData Republic developed deep learning models that automatically recognize railway assets. Additionally, the AI pre-selects camera footage containing potential defects on Insulated Rail Joints (such as burr formation or battered rail heads) and prepares it for human review.
The result
- Workload cut in half: 53% of the images
- Massive time savings
- Actionable insights
- Nationwide potential