Real-Time Survivor Detection System in SaR Missions Using Robots

Abstract

This paper considers the issue of the search and rescue operation of humans after natural or man-made disasters. This problem arises after several calamities, such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and explosions. It usually takes hours to locate the survivors in the debris. In most cases, it is dangerous for the rescue workers to visit and explore the whole area by themselves. Hence, there is a need for speeding up the whole process of locating survivors accurately and with less damage to human life. To tackle this challenge, we present a scalable solution. We plan to introduce the usage of robots for the initial exploration of the calamity site. The robots will explore the site and identify the location of human survivors by examining the video feed (with audio) captured by them. They will then stream the detected location of the survivor to a centralized cloud server. It will also monitor the associated air quality of the selected area to determine whether it is safe for rescue workers to enter the region or not. The human detection model for images that we have used has a mAP (mean average precision) of 70.2%. The proposed approach uses a speech detection technique which has an F1 score of 0.9186 and the overall accuracy of the architecture is 95.83%. To improve the detection accuracy, we have combined audio detection and image detection techniques.