Frequency Variability Feature for Life Signs Detection and Localization in Natural Disasters

Abstract

The locations and breathing signal of people in disaster areas are significant information for search and rescue missions in prioritizing operations to save more lives. For detecting the living people who are lying on the ground and covered with dust, debris or ashes, a motion magnification-based method has recently been proposed. This current method estimates the locations and breathing signal of people from a drone video by assuming that only human breathing-related motions exist in the video. However, in natural disasters, background motions, such as swing trees and grass caused by wind, are mixed with human breathing, that distort this assumption, resulting in misleading or even no life signs locations. Therefore, the life signs in disaster areas are challenging to be detected due to the undesired background motions. Note that human breathing is a natural physiological phenomenon, and it is a periodic motion with a steady peak frequency; while background motion always involves complex space-time behaviors, their peak frequencies seem to be variable over time. Therefore, in this work we analyze and focus on the frequency properties of motions to model a frequency variability feature used for extracting only human breathing, while eliminating irrelevant background motions in the video, which would ease the challenge in detection and localization of life signs. The proposed method was validated with both drone and camera videos recorded in the wild. The average precision measures of our method for drone and camera videos were 0.94 and 0.92, which are higher than that of compared methods, demonstrating that our method is more robust and accurate to background motions. The implications and limitations regarding the frequency variability feature were discussed.