Drone taught to distinguish living people from the dead

Engineers from Australia and Iraq taught an ordinary drone with a camera to distinguish between living people and dead people. The system analyzes the frames from the camera, determines the area with the chest on them and recognizes movements caused by breathing by periodic changes in brightness. The article was published in the journal Remote Sensing.

The main benefit of drones is the ability to inspect terrain or buildings from great heights. Usually this is used for photo or video shooting, but drones have another serious use - the search for missing people.

When developing drones for rescue operations, engineers face two technical difficulties. The first of them is the difficulty of detecting a person when shooting from high altitude. The second problem is related to the first one and consists in the fact that even if a person’s silhouette is visible on the frames, in some cases, for example, during natural disasters with a large number of victims, rescuers need to be able to separate living people from the dead in order to concentrate on those who can still help. Usually, an infrared camera is installed on the drone as a solution to both problems, but, for example, in hot countries, the contrast between body temperature and the environment can be small.

A group of engineers from Iraq and Australia, led by Javaan Chahl from the University of South Australia, used a different principle in their development - breathing recognition from data from an action camera mounted via a gimbal on a quadcopter. The main innovation in the work is not the hardware, but the algorithm for recognizing breathing.

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