ABSTRACT

With the Human - Elephant Conflict (HEC) becoming a significant issue in

almost all places, the elephants crossing in the railway tracks poses a serious
threat to the life of the elephants, leading to the continuous increase in the
number of elephant deaths in this regard. In India, Elephant - Train Collision
has been a serious issue, causing the death of 100+ elephants over the years.

In this study, an automatic preventive system to detect, localize, monitor &

prevent elephant deaths in railway tracks by capturing the elephant footfall
vibrations that are produced due to the weight of the elephants’ gigantic body
using a wireless sensor network of geophones is proposed. Besides the
elephant movement data, with the help of other pre-fed topological data and
railway timings data, the system will be able to predict the probability of
occurrence of collision and be intelligent enough to make the right decision
based on the situation.

For such system, the detection of elephants using their footfall vibrations can
be done by using various ground-based vibration sensors. A ground-based
vibration sensor network with necessary signal conditioning circuit to eliminate
the noises is deployed after the required geotechnical analysis to collect the
data of the elephants’ vibrations. The sample data collected are then analyzed
using various frequency transformation techniques like Fast Fourier Transform
and Continuous Wavelet Transform to particularly capture the elephants’
vibration dataset and to classify them based on the feature extracted in those
techniques.

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