Seeing Through the Forest Canopy with Thermal Imaging & AI | FLIR | Search and Rescue

Finding a hiker lost in the woods is a challenging mission—if the person is lost in densely forested terrain, then sunlight is largely blocked by trees and other vegetation, and the ground reflects very little light. Luckily, we might soon see AI-guided thermal imaging drones that can “see through” the forest canopy and visualize heat signatures on the ground below. Read the full story: https://www.flir.com/discover/cores-components/researchers-develop-search-and-rescue-technology-that-sees-through-forest-with-thermal-imaging/ A team of researchers at Johannes Kepler University in Austria released a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence that describes a technique called airborne optical sectioning (AOS), which allows an aerial imager to see through occlusions like a forest canopy. The team, headed by Professor Oliver Bimber, achieved an accurate classification rate of over 90% using a drone equipped with a FLIR Vue Pro thermal imaging camera and a machine learning algorithm trained to identify humans below.