Vision-Based UAV Maritime Search and Rescue Using Point Target Detection

摘要

Human maritime search and rescue missions have always been challengingudand an element of chance is involved in the detection of survivors at sea. Thisudresearch is proposing the use of machine vision to assist UAVs to increase theudchances of success in locating humans lost at sea.ududThis paper presents an application of current image processing methods for targetuddetection in a synthetic maritime scenario. An evaluation of the algorithm’sudperformance is also provided. The difficulties faced in the automatic detection ofudhuman targets in a maritime search environment are also considered.ududThe paper concludes that there is a range of greyscale intensities, approximately 26%udbased on current data set, where the target was unable to be detected which may limitudthe applicability of the algorithm. The effect on performance of target intensity level,udthreshold and forgetting factor are also investigated.