Ignitarium and AVerMedia Launch AI-driven Airborne Railway Track Inspection Solution

Ignitarium, a leading product engineering design house and provider of AI software and AVerMedia, a multinational company specializing in hardware for image capture and video transmission announce the rollout of a new class of aircraft-based railway track anomaly detection solutions, for the global railroad maintenance industry.

Ignitarium has been working on a whole spectrum of compelling problem statements from both new-age and traditional industries using AI. Its Visual AI-based TYQ-i™ Defect Detection platform has also been used to address several challenging problems from industries as varied as infrastructure, transportation, food, footwear, automotive, solar etc. Specific to the infrastructure space, Ignitarium has deployed AI solutions for the railway industry and is currently deploying aerial-based analytics solutions for other high value assets like power transmission towers, cellular towers, roads, canals, pipelines, bridges, solar farms, construction sites, and buildings.

The first step towards accurate anomaly detection on rail tracks, from the air, is the ability to precisely capture the artefacts of interest, compensating for aircraft pitch, roll and yaw. Ignitarium’s Dynamic Camera Alignment software running on an AVerMedia Box PC EX731-AAH2-2AC0 (with an NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module inside) allows the acquisition of high quality video where every rail track related object-of-interest is perfectly “centered” in every single captured frame. These frames are then analyzed by Ignitarium’s TYQ-i™ Defect Detection software platform to generate a detailed list of anomalies including cracked ties, skewed ties, damaged plates, missing spikes etc. Anomaly detection runs on the more powerful NVIDIA Jetson Xavier AGX.. This new category of from-the-air rather than traditional terrestrial platform based, allows vast lengths of railway tracks to be inspected in the least amount of time without disrupting rail schedules.

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”.

AVerMedia who is partnering with Ignitarium on this range of solutions, is a multinational company specializing in hardware and software for image capturing and video transmission solutions, aiming to enrich entertainment experiences and provide effective communication between people in a wide range of professional fields.

“Backed by the video technology & enriched manufacturing experience over 30 years, AVerMedia is proud to offer full range of Jetson hardware solution as the ELITE partner of NVIDIA’s. We design carrier boards, embedded systems, application-ready platforms for TX1/TX2/TX2i/AGX Xavier/Nano/Xavier NX modules which are optimized for low power consumption, small size and interface flexibility. We also provide video application development SDK and software design services for Linux BSP, drivers, OpenCV and VisionWorks. Aiming to utilize implementation of AI at the Edge, AVerMedia actively partner up with software companies and system integrators to establish the ecosystem ready to go for clients indeed to deploy Jetson solutions. Together with Ignitarium, we are proud to offer one-stop-shopping solution to Indian, American, and European customers fast and furiously,” said Bryan Wang, Sales Manager, MEAIN (Middle East & India) for AVerMedia.

AVerMedia’s EX731-AAH2-2AC0 Box PC equips NVIDIA Jetson TX2 module and 2x 4Kp30 capture cards for analyzing dual 4Kp30 video inputs. It also support SSD for video recording applications. This Box PC equips a customized chassis with an active cooling system, making it a compact application-ready system to run edge computing algorithms for high-end video analysis application markets.

SkyCam Aviation Inc. is a provider of high resolution and high quality aerial imaging,  videography and photography, aerial surveillance monitoring and aerial patrol. “Skycam Aviation has been at the forefront of transforming manual-labor intensive workflows associated with traditional infrastructure monitoring into highly automated methodologies. Our ability to schedule and operate aircraft with specialized imaging systems onboard has allowed our customers to maintain high-value assets at the most economical price points. Our close partnership with Ignitarium has allowed the integration of their advanced AI-driven algorithms into the image acquisition pipeline to deliver world-class solutions for anomaly detection in rail-tracks and other infrastructural assets,” said Skycam CTO, Christopher Dombrowski.