Papers › Search and Rescue with Airborne Optical Sectioning

Search and Rescue with Airborne Optical Sectioning

18 Sep 2020arXiv:2009.08835archive 2025-07-28

David C. Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi, Oliver Bimber

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 synthetic aperture imaging technique that uses camera drones to capture unstructured thermal light fields---to achieve this with a precision/recall of 96/93%. Finding lost or injured people in dense forests is not generally feasible with thermal recordings, but becomes practical with 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.

PaperPDFCode

Code

christophostertag/SAR-Python mentioned on GitHubpytorch report
tensorware/aos-evaluation mentioned on GitHub report
tensorware/aos-simulation mentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

General ClassificationHuman Detection

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections