Visual Search on Aerial Imagery as Support for Finding Lost Persons

The mountain rescue services in Croatia and BiH have been using UAVs on search and rescue missions for years. They prove to be very effective on the hard-to-reach Mediterranean karsts landscape, characterized by low but not too dense vegetation. After mapping some terrain segment and collecting a large number of precise and detailed footage from above, images are visually scanned and examined by search rescue member/s. In this paper we will examine the effectiveness of visual search of human observers for the purpose of finding missing/lost persons on aerial imagery.