Award for the SARUAV System
Creators of SARUAV, prof. Tomasz Niedzielski, dr Mirosława Jurecka, and dr Bartłomiej Miziński of the Department of Geoinformatics and Cartography of the University of Wrocław have received the Award of the Minister of Economic Development and Technology in Geoinformatics in the Innovative Solutions category for 2021. The SARUAV is a system for automatic detection of people from aerial images and a tool to support the search for missing people.
How does the system work? In the first stage, it determines the area of the missing person’s possible whereabouts. Then, a drone is deployed to the location to take hundreds of aerial photographs and thoroughly surveil the area. In the second stage, the photographs are submitted for analysis by an algorithm designed specifically for searching for people. This is the biggest challenge for the project. On the one hand, the technology has to be adapted to identify people accurately. On the other, the operations have to be automated properly to create the conditions for real-time processing of large data sets so that the rescuers can receive the missing person’s location as soon as possible.
Translated by Natalia Noworól (student of English Studies at the University of Wrocław) as part of the translation practice.
