A Review of Smart Drone Technologies for Security Surveillance and Search and Rescue

Source abstract

Drones are increasingly being used in search and rescue operations due to their ease of use, wide coverage, and cost. Therefore, this research has faced challenges, including identifying human figures in aerial photographs, as these figures may be small and unclear, and are also affected by several factors, such as darkness or bad weather conditions, such as fog and dust, or because of debris resulting from disasters. One of the most important areas of research currently in vogue is the integration of drones with cloud computing systems and attackable devices. This integration leads to increased efficiency in emergency response. Furthermore, small, lightweight, and power-efficient embedded devices such as the Jetson Nano are powered by advanced portable AI systems that offer real-time analysis with the necessary precision and speed. This is an encouraging development in the field of application. In the field of computer vision, advancements have been made in detection models, such as the introduction of context enrichment modules to enhance the accuracy of small target detection. Efforts have also been made to create new databases, such as thermal imaging of partially occluded individuals, which contributes to filling a clear gap in available resources. In the field of multi-sensing, thermal and optical imaging are combined using transformer techniques to overcome the limitations of traditional convolutional networks, and acoustic sensing is used to identify human cries and characteristic signals in disaster environments. The novelty of these studies lies in the construction of new databases that support challenging rescue scenarios, the optimization of lightweight models to suit capacity-limited devices, and the potential for integrating drones with multiple sensing and communication channels (optical, thermal, acoustic, and wearable devices). These contributions also form the basis for developing practical frameworks that support future surveillance and search and rescue missions.