# Rethinking Drone-Based Search and Rescue with Aerial Person Detection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2111.09406 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.09406/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 17 Nov 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Fully Convolutional Networks for Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.4038/) (2014)
- [Squeeze-and-Excitation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01507/) (2017)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [SSD: Single Shot MultiBox Detector](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.02325/) (2015)
- [Revisiting Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data in Deep Learning Era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.02968/) (2017)
- [Training Region-based Object Detectors with Online Hard Example Mining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.03540/) (2016)
- [The Open Images Dataset V4: Unified image classification, object detection, and visual relationship detection at scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.00982/) (2018)
- [Deep Learning for Generic Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.02165/) (2018)
- [Soft-NMS -- Improving Object Detection With One Line of Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.04503/) (2017)
- [Learning Data Augmentation Strategies for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.11172/) (2019)
- [Salient Object Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5878/) (2014)
- [A note on the triangle inequality for the Jaccard distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.02696/) (2016)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Open Problems in Computer Vision for Wilderness SAR and The Search for Patricia Wu-Murad](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14527/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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 automate this aerial person detection (APD) task. We experiment with model architecture selection, online data augmentation, transfer learning, image tiling and several other techniques to improve the test performance of our method. We present the novel Aerial Inspection RetinaNet (AIR) algorithm as the combination of these contributions. The AIR detector demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a commonly used SAR test data set in terms of both precision (~21 percentage point increase) and speed. In addition, we provide a new formal definition for the APD problem in SAR missions. That is, we propose a novel evaluation scheme that ranks detectors in terms of real-world SAR localization requirements. Finally, we propose a novel postprocessing method for robust, approximate object localization: the merging of overlapping bounding boxes (MOB) algorithm. This final processing stage used in the AIR detector significantly improves its performance and usability in the face of real-world aerial SAR missions.