Enhancing Search and Rescue Missions with UAV Thermal Video Tracking

Wilderness Search and Rescue (WSAR) missions are time-critical emergency response operations that require locating a lost person within a short timeframe. Large forested terrains must be explored in challenging environments and adverse conditions. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) equipped with thermal cameras enable the efficient exploration of vast areas. However, manual analysis of the huge amount of collected data is difficult, time-consuming, and prone to errors, increasing the risk of missing a person. This work proposes an object detection and tracking pipeline that automatically analyzes UAV thermal videos in real-time to identify lost people in forest environments. The tracking module combines information from multiple viewpoints to suppress false alarms and focus responders’ efforts. In this moving camera scenario, tracking performance is enhanced by introducing a motion compensation module based on known camera poses. Experimental results on the collected thermal video dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed tracking-based approach by achieving a Precision of 90.3% and a Recall of 73.4%. On a dataset of UAV thermal images, the introduced camera alignment technique increases the Recall by 6.1%, with negligible computational overhead, reaching 35.2 FPS. The proposed approach, optimized for real-time video processing, has direct application in real-world WSAR missions to improve operational efficiency.