Railway Transportation Solution: LiDAR for Tunnel Entrance Intrusion Detection (Part 1-Background)

The rail transit system offers cities reliable and practical mobility. Obstacle detection has become a crucial issue during rail transit operations. The rail transportation system is gradually integrating LiDAR and visual image processing technology, which has become a crucial instrument for obstacle detection, to ensure the safety of passengers and normal operation. In this article, we will discuss the background of how LiDAR became an option for tunnel entrance intrusion detection in railway transportation.

In China, railways are an important infrastructure and a popular means of transportation, playing a crucial role in the national comprehensive transportation system. Due to China’s vast territory, large population, and uneven distribution of resources, railway transportation has significant advantages in terms of economic efficiency in China. Railways are widely used for both cargo and passenger transport and is essential for maintaining economic stability and social development.

However, safety has always been an absolute necessity and an eternal theme for railway transportation. Railway safety not only affects the company’s production efficiency and economic benefits, but it also substantially impacts society and the economy as a whole. As China’s railway network expands and improves, it is crucial to ensure the safety, quality, and speed of railway lines to meet the growing demand for transportation.

It is worth noting that China has varied terrain, with mountains covering over 70% of the country’s land area. Mountainous areas have 56% of the overall population. As a result, most of the railway lines in China’s railway transportation system must travel through mountains, making them vulnerable to natural calamities such as landslides, mudslides, rockfalls, and so on. These calamities not only damage normal railway operations but can also result in severe accidents and fatalities.

To deal with these difficulties, we need to constantly improve natural disaster prevention measures for railway transportation. Among them are slope sliding risk factors, such as collapses or falling rocks, which are critical elements impacting railway transportation safety. As a result, the installation of LiDAR for intrusion monitoring systems at train tunnel entrances is critical.

This system uses high-resolution solid-state LiDAR technology to scan and detect railway tunnel entrances in real time, providing high-density point cloud data. Edge computing analysis by computers in real-time processing of these data can accurately identify intrusions such as landslides or falling rocks and then generate warning information, triggering onsite audio-visual alarms and providing onsite warnings while transmitting data wirelessly via 4G/5G signals to cloud servers, providing decision-makers with intuitive information about the warning area.

As a result, LiDAR plays an important role in intrusion detection at railway tunnel entrances. It not only enhances railway transportation safety and minimizes disaster-related losses, but it also ensures the normal operation of railway transit, thereby maintaining the stability and efficiency of the national transportation system. As a major manufacturer of MEMS technology-based high-resolution solid-state LiDAR, Neuvition LiDAR products have been widely deployed in railway transit, providing necessary technical assistance for improving safety and reliability in China’s railway transportation.