Real-Time Hazard Symbol Detection and Localization Using UAV Imagery

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) technology is advancing at a fast pace following the strong rise in interest in its applications for a wide variety of scenarios. One of the promising use cases for UAVs is their deployment during emergency and rescue operations. Their high mobility, aerial viewpoint and flexibility to be operated autonomously are huge assets during crises. UAVs exist in a wide range when it comes to cost, and so do the sensors or accessories they can carry along as payload. During emergencies it may be beneficial to have several low-cost UAVs on site, as opposed to one highly sophisticated, fully-equipped aerial platform. This way more ground can be covered in a shorter span of time during search-and-rescue operations. The situation where a single UAV is on the ground to recharge its battery can also be avoided. In this paper, we present an architecture that identifies and locates objects of interest in real-time using low-cost hardware and a state of the art object detection algorithm. We avoid the use of expensive LIDAR sensors and UAVs, but still manage to determine the position of specific predefined objects in the field with high precision. Without augmenting our detection setup by using intelligent adaptive flight patterns, we can locate an object within 1.5m of its actual location at very low latency. Our detection chain delivers the result and its location in well under one second.