Reliability of manual assessments in determining the types of vegetation on railway tracks

Nyberg, Roger G.; Yella, Siril; Gupta, Narendra K; Dougherty, Mark

Abstract

Current day vegetation assessments within railway maintenance are (to a large extent) carried out manually. This study has investigated the reliability of such manual assessments by taking three non-domain experts into account. Thirty-five track images under different conditions were acquired for the purpose. For each image, the raters’ were asked to estimate the cover of woody plants, herbs and grass separately (in %) using methods such as aerial canopy cover, aerial foliar cover and sub-plot frequency. Visual estimates of raters’ were recorded and analysis-of-variance tests on the mean cover estimates were investigated to see whether if there were disagreements between the raters’. Intra-correlation coefficient was used to study the differences between the estimates. Results achieved in this work revealed that seven out of the nine analysis-of-variance tests conducted in this study have demonstrated significant difference in the mean estimates of cover

Citation

Nyberg, R. G., Yella, S., Gupta, N. K., & Dougherty, M. (2015, November). Reliability of manual assessments in determining the types of vegetation on railway tracks. Presented at Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015, Miami, FL, USA

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015
• Start Date: Nov 1, 2015
• End Date: Nov 3, 2015
• Online Publication Date: Dec 18, 2015
• Publication Date: Dec 18, 2015
• Deposit Date: Nov 2, 2015
• Electronic ISSN: 1611-3349
• Publisher: Springer
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 9419
• Pages: 391-399
• Series Title: Lecture Notes in Computer Science
• Series Number: 9419
• Series ISSN: 0302-9743
• Book Title: Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015
• ISBN: 978-3-319-26186-7
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26187-4_37
• Keywords: Railway maintenance; vegetation; analysis-of-variance tests
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/id/eprint/9252