Automatic Car Safety Appliance Inspection System

The Automatic Car Safety Appliance Inspection System (ApplianceView) is a new wayside railcar inspection system from Beena Vision Systems, Inc. This is a “Machine Vision” based system for automatic assessment of freight car safety appliance condition. The system is typically installed on a wayside truss structure.
The main goal of the system is to facilitate the identification of safety appliances that are not compliant with the FRA rules.

The system is currently operational for:

• Open top hoppers
• High-sided gondolas
• Covered hoppers
• Box cars

and is being expanded to tanker and flat cars.

This product is currently used to identify and inspect following safety appliances on freight cars:

• Brake Wheel
• End Platform
• Brake Step
• Ladders
• Handholds
• Uncoupling Lever
• Sill Step

The system deploys stereo vision technology to detect components and identify safety appliances that are in violation of the FRA standards, such as clearances, visibly broken appliances, dimensions, etc.

The system uses several cameras to capture images of every car and uses sophisticated image processing algorithms to detect and evaluate all relevant safety appliances.

The system reconstructs corners of the freight car in 3-dimensional space for complete evaluation and is designed to operate in all lighting conditions and day/night operation.

The system is capable of classifying cars for a more effective inspection of different freight cars, including open top and covered hoppers, box cars, and tankers.

The system comes with a complete set of viewing and database interface software modules. A car based report is generated for each train in CSV file format. A graphical report of detected defects is also made available to the user.