Journal of Applied Data Sciences
Vol 7, No 4: December 2026

Real-Time PPE Violation Detection and Tracking in Low-Light Industrial Environments Using YOLOv9t, TensorRT, and ByteTrack

Fathorazi Nur Fajri (Nurul Jadid University)
Kamil Malik (Nurul Jadid University)
Abu Tholib (Nurul Jadid University)



Article Info

Publish Date
02 Oct 2026

Abstract

Coal-fired power plants require correct PPE use, but low light in turbine halls, corridors, and nighttime inspection routes limits automated visual monitoring. This study builds and tests a real-time detection-and-tracking pipeline combining a YOLOv9t detector, TensorRT inference, and ByteTrack multi-object tracking for PPE violation monitoring under these conditions. A photometric check of the evaluation footage (mean pixel intensity 117.86/255, 14.68% of pixels below the 64/255 dark-pixel threshold) places it in the dim-illumination band defined by the IEEE 1789 photometric convention, confirming the reported gains were measured under genuinely degraded lighting. Trained on a violation-aware dataset of 11,407 annotated images across eight compliance and violation classes, TensorRT cut mean inference latency from 34.55 ms (PyTorch) to 6.26 ms (FP32) and 5.25 ms (FP16), a paired t-test (t = 13.1223, p 0.001) confirming the engine-level gain, while mAP@50 dropped only marginally (0.9134 to 0.9084). Because TensorRT builds can vary run to run, FP32 and FP16 were each validated across independent builds: FP16 matched FP32 in accuracy and ran 1.32x faster (5.25 vs 6.93 ms, p 0.001), so FP16 was selected for the pipeline below. Extending the comparison beyond one tracker, ByteTrack, DeepSORT, and SORT were benchmarked on identical input from a 128-second, 3,840-frame low-light CCTV clip at the PLTU Paiton gate. ByteTrack reached 82.62 FPS with MOTA 0.7543 (relative to a pseudo ground truth), clearing our 60 FPS real-time threshold (2× the 30 FPS source rate) with the best tracking accuracy of the three; DeepSORT managed only 27.08 FPS despite re-identification embeddings, and SORT (90.29 FPS) produced over 1.3× ByteTrack's identity switches. Across 320 worker identities, mean track duration was 26.74 frames (0.89 s).

Copyrights © 2026






Journal Info

Abbrev

JADS

Publisher

Subject

Computer Science & IT Control & Systems Engineering Decision Sciences, Operations Research & Management

Description

One of the current hot topics in science is data: how can datasets be used in scientific and scholarly research in a more reliable, citable and accountable way? Data is of paramount importance to scientific progress, yet most research data remains private. Enhancing the transparency of the processes ...