Drones Leverage Artificial Intelligence to Locate People Lost in Woods

It is a widely known fact in the tech world that drones are flown at high altitudes, and they cannot yet fly autonomously in complex environments, like dense forests. However, thanks to latest advancements in artificial intelligence and computer vision, today drones can maneuver indoors, around difficult to reach nooks, bends and even dense forests too. Well, recently drones again hit the headlines, owing to their new ability to help people, hikers lost in woods. In their paper published in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence, researchers, David Schedl, Indrajit Kurmi and Oliver Bimber, from Johannes Kepler University, share how artificial intelligence to improve thermal imaging camera searches for people lost in woods. When hikers, trekkers or commoners are lost in woods, rescue team rely on binoculars, and thermal imagers installed on camera and in chopper sensors, to find the missing.