Advancements toward autonomous access hole detection for urban search and rescue

Abstract

The collapse of buildings creates voids underneath rubble, where victims may be trapped. First responder crews arriving at a collapse scene are responsible for the location of access holes, among other tasks. Access holes are entry points through which rubble voids may be reached by search and rescue personnel. Previously presented work aimed to autonomously locate such holes, aiding concentration of resources to areas of interest, such as those leading into rubble. The work proposed improves upon existing work by increasing accuracy while reducing total number of detections. A new process is introduced for segmentation of colour and depth images, significantly improving the hole finding system’s accuracy. The ability to score holes based on multiple frames, considering various points of view is introduced. As an added benefit, matching holes across frames allows the algorithm to report holes once per group of matches, rather than once per frame.