Israel Railways is the national company with responsibility for all passenger and freight railway traffic in Israel. IR was looking for a new security system to protect train stations and railways against terrorist attacks. Specifically, the goal was to protect the stations against terrorists approaching from the train tracks and the area adjacent to the tracks.

Railway tracks are a very difficult environment for image processing. The challenge was to detect intruders from any direction at any time and in any weather, while ignoring trains, shadows, light reflections, vegetation, animals and other objects.

In fact, all previously tested video motion detection (VMD) systems failed their evaluations because they could not differentiate between train motion and intruder motion, resulting in false alarm and nuisance alarm rates.

IR needed the video intelligence and analytics of the Agent Vi System, which automates the security process, using proprietary detectors to analyze suspicious activity and generate real-time security alerts. For this specific application, the VMD solution was installed to detect any suspicious movement on, near or around the railway tracks and stations. The VMD automatically detects and tracks people and vehicles to generate alerts about suspicious activities and relay alerts to the command/control center.

For added security, IR's system was configured so that any system operator on the network could review and analyze suspicious activity. The strength of the system comes from its patented image processing over IP technology, which automatically extracts threat-specific data from any number of simultaneous image (video or still) input devices connected to an IP network.