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Reliability of Manual Assessments in Determining the Types of Vegetation on Railway Tracks

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Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015 (WISE 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 9419))

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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 (p < 0.05).

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Correspondence to Siril Yella .

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Yella, S., Nyberg, R.G., Gupta, N.K., Dougherty, M. (2015). Reliability of Manual Assessments in Determining the Types of Vegetation on Railway Tracks. In: Wang, J., et al. Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2015. WISE 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9419. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26187-4_37

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26187-4_37

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-26186-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-26187-4

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