An Appearance-Based Tracking Algorithm for Aerial Search and Rescue Purposes

Abstract

The automation of the Wilderness Search and Rescue (WiSAR) task aims for high levels of understanding of various scenery. In addition, working in unfriendly and complex environments may cause a time delay in the operation and consequently put human lives at stake. In order to address this problem, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), which provide potential support to the conventional methods, are used. These vehicles are provided with reliable human detection and tracking algorithms; in order to be able to find and track the bodies of the victims in complex environments, and a robust control system to maintain safe distances from the detected bodies. In this paper, a human detection based on the color and depth data captured from onboard sensors is proposed. Moreover, the proposal of computing data association from the skeleton pose and a visual appearance measurement allows the tracking of multiple people with invariance to the scale, translation and rotation of the point of view with respect to the target objects. The system has been validated with real and simulation experiments, and the obtained results show the ability to track multiple individuals even after long-term disappearances. Furthermore, the simulations present the robustness of the implemented reactive control system as a promising tool for assisting the pilot to perform approaching maneuvers in a safe and smooth manner.

Detection and Localisation of Life Signs from the Air Using Image Registration and Spatio-Temporal Filtering

“…Drone-based people detection was also proposed for use in avalanche search and rescue operations [19]. Al-Kaff et al [20] developed an appearance-based tracking algorithm using the color and depth data obtained from a Kinect-V2 sensor on a drone. For aerial search and rescue purposes, they proposed two algorithms: (i) A multi-object tracking algorithm was proposed to detect victims lying on the ground in unconstrained poses and (ii) a semi-autonomous reactive control was proposed for performing safe and smooth approach maneuvers to the detected persons.…”

Cooperative Optimization of UAVs Formation Visual Tracking

“…. n}, can compute its visibility matrix M i (ψ i (t)) according to (9). Moreover, because of the hypothesis on the communication graph, we can assume that at each time instant t the matrix M ({ψ i (t)}) is known to all the agents of the formation.…”

“…Presently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) constitute an attractive research topic in robotics due to the high potential opportunities offered by these autonomous vehicles arising as a key technology in urban, rural, manufacturing and military contexts [1][2][3][4][5][6]. Quadrotors, in particular, represent the most exploited UAV platforms and their current applications range from the classical visual sensing tasks (e.g., surveillance and aerial photography [7]) to the modern environment exploration and physical interaction (e.g., search and rescue operations [8,9], grasping and manipulation tasks [10,11]). Besides their high popularity, standard quadrotors are challenged by their highly non-linear, strongly coupled and under-actuated dynamics that implies several limitations regarding both the executable maneuvers set and the efficiently achievable tasks.…”

Emergency Support Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for Forest Fire Surveillance

“…In recent years, the field of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has been given great focus in many applications, and this is due to the advances in the field of microelectronics, which have allowed improving certain characteristics, such as weight, endurance, and payload. These advances have allowed the use of this type of vehicle in a large number of applications, such as those collected by [1], which complement human labor or, in some cases, replace it [2,3]. In addition, the possibility of carrying a certain load has resulted in advanced solutions for UAVs that create added value.…”