Loc8 Software Helping Find Missing Persons with a Drone / UAS – Another Tool in the Toolbox

As a follow on to our blog post Drones for Search and Rescue (SAR) – Another Tool in The Toolbox,  where we discussed how incredibly useful drones are.  A search and rescue drone used by emergency services, such as police, firefighters or volunteer rescue teams, is ideal for searching over vast areas for missing persons and crime victims in need of rescue and in any environment.  Search times can be significantly reduced while limiting potential risk to the party being rescued as well as rescuers.

In 2018 DJI reported that 133 people around the world were rescued after being found with drones.  Also, of note is that 2018 marked a new milestone in public safety drone use, as four people were rescued by drones in three separate incidents on two continents on a single day.  

These numbers are undoubtedly higher as more search and rescue organizations discover the benefits of drones.  While many search and rescue drones are outfitted with infrared or thermal and high-resolution cameras to help assist in finding missing people.  This is not always the case.  Many of times, Searcher use their drones with their regular cameras to take aerial photos of a large area where people are reported missing or lost.

This is where the challenge begins, how do you search, sift or squint through often hundreds and hundreds of aerial photos looking for the missing individual(s)?

According to Gene Robinson. “The squinting process is where searchers comb through photos one at a time for any details that might point to recently disturbed earth or a walking trail, and for the colors of the clothes the missing person was last seen wearing. Different colors and textures represent potential clues that could lead to a recovery. A speck of blue on the screen points to a color that is rarely found in nature, and in Texas, when people go missing near ranch land, blue is often the color of the jeans they're last seen wearing.”   A SAR study shows humans are only capable of spotting a target 30% of the time when reviewing digital images.

Loc8’s software image scanning process can dramatically increase your success rate in finding your target!  Loc8 is a software solution that empowers search and rescue agencies and emergency responders to quickly scan images from aerial drone footage to locate missing people or objects by using image scanning technology that isolates specific pixel clusters.  Loc8 can go through thousands of images, much faster than is humanly possible, to locate specific color values that might represent blue in the missing persons jeans.  Once Loc8 identifies a target in an individual image it will circle it in red for quick and easy identification by the searcher.

The final product includes a map with an aerial view and a quality report that is produced with mission specific data with Latitude and Longitude coordinates of the image.  This can be passed on to searchers in the field to locate the target.

Loc8’s software is a very exciting advancement in search and rescue that I have now utilized on training and actual searches and may help your SAR team find missing persons faster.  Loc8’s software should be - another tool in the toolbox!