Related papers: An Autonomous Drone for Search and Rescue in Fores…
We show that automated person detection under occlusion conditions can be significantly improved by combining multi-perspective images before classification. Here, we employed image integration by Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS)---a…
Fully autonomous drones have been demonstrated to find lost or injured persons under strongly occluding forest canopy. Airborne Optical Sectioning (AOS), a novel synthetic aperture imaging technique, together with deep-learning-based…
Utilizing autonomous drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has shown great advantages over preceding methods in support of urgent scenarios such as search and rescue (SAR) and wildfire detection. In these operations, search efficiency…
Traditional search and rescue methods in wilderness areas can be time-consuming and have limited coverage. Drones offer a faster and more flexible solution, but optimizing their search paths is crucial. This paper explores the use of deep…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
The visual inspection of aerial drone footage is an integral part of land search and rescue (SAR) operations today. Since this inspection is a slow, tedious and error-prone job for humans, we propose a novel deep learning algorithm to…
Natural disasters affect millions of people every year. Finding missing persons in the shortest possible time is of crucial importance to reduce the death toll. This task is especially challenging when victims are sparsely distributed in…
We demonstrate how efficient autonomous drone swarms can be in detecting and tracking occluded targets in densely forested areas, such as lost people during search and rescue missions. Exploration and optimization of local viewing…
UAVs are playing an increasingly important role in the field of wilderness rescue by virtue of their flexibility. This paper proposes a fusion of UAV vision technology and satellite image analysis technology for active wildfires detection…
Obstacle avoidance is a key feature for safe Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) navigation. While solutions have been proposed for static obstacle avoidance, systems enabling avoidance of dynamic objects, such as drones, are hard to implement…
Fast, autonomous flight in unstructured, cluttered environments such as forests is challenging because it requires the robot to compute new plans in realtime on a computationally-constrained platform. In this paper, we enable this…
Detecting and tracking moving targets through foliage is difficult, and for many cases even impossible in regular aerial images and videos. We present an initial light-weight and drone-operated 1D camera array that supports parallel…
The safe operation of drone swarms beyond visual line of sight requires multiple safeguards to mitigate the risk of collision between drones flying in close-proximity scenarios. Cooperative navigation and flight coordination strategies that…
Detecting missing persons in forest environments remains a challenge, as dense canopy cover often conceals individuals from detection in top-down or oblique aerial imagery typically captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While UAVs…
In recent years, increased wildfires have caused irreversible damage to forest resources worldwide, threatening wildlives and human living conditions. The lack of accurate frontline information in real-time can pose great risks to…
The speed of response by search and rescue teams at sea is of vital importance, as survival may depend on it. Recent technological advancements have led to the development of more efficient systems for locating individuals involved in a…
The advancement of autonomous drones, essential for sectors such as remote sensing and emergency services, is hindered by the absence of training datasets that fully capture the environmental challenges present in real-world scenarios,…
Terrain awareness is an essential milestone to enable truly autonomous off-road navigation. Accurately predicting terrain characteristics allows optimizing a vehicle's path against potential hazards. Recent methods use deep neural networks…
This paper details the challenges in applying two computer vision systems, an EfficientDET supervised learning model and the unsupervised RX spectral classifier, to 98.9 GB of drone imagery from the Wu-Murad wilderness search and rescue…
With technological advancement, drone has emerged as unmanned aerial vehicle that can be controlled by humans to fly or reach a destination. This may be autonomous as well, where the drone itself is intelligent enough to find a shortest…