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Search and rescue with airborne optical sectioning

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 2, pages 783–790 (2020)Cite this article

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A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv.

Abstract

In the future, rescuing lost, ill or injured persons will increasingly be carried out by autonomous drones. However, discovering humans in densely forested terrain is challenging because of occlusion, and robust detection mechanisms are required. We show that automated person detection under occlusion conditions can be notably improved by combining multi-perspective images before classification. Here, we employ image integration by airborne optical sectioning (AOS)—a synthetic aperture imaging technique that uses camera drones to capture unstructured thermal light fields—to achieve this with a precision and recall of 96% and 93%, respectively. Finding lost or injured people in dense forests is not generally feasible with thermal recordings, but becomes practical with the use of AOS integral images. Our findings lay the foundation for effective future search-and-rescue technologies that can be applied in combination with autonomous or manned aircraft. They can also be beneficial for other fields that currently suffer from inaccurate classification of partially occluded people, animals or objects.

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Fig. 1: Airborne optical sectioning.
Fig. 2: Results of an initial field experiment.
Fig. 3: AOS without and with occlusion.
Fig. 4: AOS person detection results for the 10 test scenes.
Fig. 5: Single-image person detection results for the 10 test scenes.

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Data availability

The data collected in experiments with users can be downloaded from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.389477358 and includes labels and augmented images for training, validation and testing, configuration files, trained network weights and results.

Code availability

Code to compute Tables 2 and 3 is provided with the dataset58. Further code that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant no. P 32185-NBL and by the State of Upper Austria and the Austrian Federal Ministry of Education, Science and Research via the LIT (Linz Institute of Technology) under grant no. LIT-2019-8-SEE-114.

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  1. Johannes Kepler University, Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Linz, Austria

    David C. Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi & Oliver Bimber

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  1. David C. Schedl
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Contributions

D.C.S. and O.B. conceived and designed the experiments. D.C.S. and I.K. performed the experiments. D.C.S. and O.B. analysed the data. D.C.S. and I.K. contributed materials/analysis tools. D.C.S. and O.B. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Oliver Bimber.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Machine Intelligence thanks Professor Hong Hua, Professor Daisuki Iwai and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Sections 1–6, Figs. 1–6 and Tables 1 and 2.

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Schedl, D.C., Kurmi, I. & Bimber, O. Search and rescue with airborne optical sectioning. Nat Mach Intell 2, 783–790 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-020-00261-3

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