Missing person searches are typically initiated with a description of a person that includes their age, race, clothing, and gender, possibly supported by a photo. Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) imbued with Computer Vision (CV) capabilities, can be deployed to quickly search an area to find the missing person; however, the search task is far more difficult when a crowd of people is present, and only the person described in the missing person report must be identified. It is particularly challenging to perform this task on the potentially limited resources of an sUAS. We therefore propose AirSight, as a new model that hierarchically combines multiple CV models, exploits both onboard and off-board computing capabilities, and engages humans interactively in the search. For illustrative purposes, we use AirSight to show how a person's image, extracted from an aerial video can be matched to a basic description of the person. Finally, as a work-in-progress paper, we describe ongoing efforts in building an aerial dataset of partially occluded people and physically deploying AirSight on our sUAS. 
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                            NOMAD: A Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset, for Emergency Response Scenarios
                        
                    
    
            With the increasing reliance on small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) for Emergency Response Scenarios, such as Search and Rescue, the integration of computer vision capabilities has become a key factor in mission success. Nevertheless, computer vision performance for detecting humans severely degrades when shifting from ground to aerial views. Several aerial datasets have been created to mitigate this problem, however, none of them has specifically addressed the issue of occlusion, a critical component in Emergency Response Scenarios. Natural, Occluded, Multi-scale Aerial Dataset (NOMAD) presents a benchmark for human detection under occluded aerial views, with five different aerial distances and rich imagery variance. NOMAD is composed of 100 different Actors, all performing sequences of walking, laying and hiding. It includes 42,825 frames, extracted from 5.4k resolution videos, and manually annotated with a bounding box and a label describing 10 different visibility levels, categorized according to the percentage of the human body visible inside the bounding box. This allows computer vision models to be evaluated on their detection performance across different ranges of occlusion. NOMAD is designed to improve the effectiveness of aerial search and rescue and to enhance collaboration between sUAS and humans, by providing a new benchmark dataset for human detection under occluded aerial views. 
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                            - Award ID(s):
- 1931962
- PAR ID:
- 10523096
- Publisher / Repository:
- IEEE
- Date Published:
- Edition / Version:
- 2024
- ISBN:
- 979-8-3503-1892-0
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 8569 to 8580
- Subject(s) / Keyword(s):
- Aerial Computer Vision Search and Rescue occlusion dataset
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Waikoloa, HI, USA
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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