Augmenting Women’s Safety-in-Numbers in Railway Carriages with Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Sexual harassment of women traveling on railway carriages is a widespread problem. The predominant method used to address this problem is for women to travel in groups, utilizing Safety-in-Numbers, to hinder and discourage attacks against them. However, when the number of women in a railway carriage is low, there is no safety system in place to detect the imminent danger and proactively alert security personnel. In this work, we consider a system that keeps track of the number of passengers in a railway carriage using a wireless sensor network and automatically notifies security personnel when the number of passengers goes below a certain threshold. Here, we consider different scenarios and evaluate if our solution approach will work in the different cases considered. We also evaluated different techniques for automatically counting the number of people aboard a railway carriage. Our initial experimental results show that we are able to estimate the number of people in a room (considered in lieu of a railway carriage) with a high degree of accuracy using the background subtraction method. We hope that the proposed architecture in concert with the people counting technique will be able to significantly improve the safety of women traveling in railway carriages.