Summary

In recent years, drones have increasingly supported First Responders (FRs) in monitoring incidents and providing additional information. However, analysing drone footage is time-intensive and cognitively demanding. In this research, we investigate the use of AI models for the detection of humans in drone footage to aid FRs in tasks such as locating victims. Detecting small-scale objects, particularly humans from high altitudes, poses a challenge for AI systems. We present first steps of introducing and evaluating a series of YOLOv8 Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) for human detection from drone images. The models are fine-tuned on a created drone image dataset of the Dutch Fire Services and were able to achieve a 53.1% F1-Score, identifying 439 out of 825 humans in the test dataset. These preliminary findings, validated by an incident commander, highlight the promising utility of these models. Ongoing efforts aim to further refine the models and explore additional technologies.