5 ms·

Wouldn't infrared cameras work better? Or does the forest blocks a persons heat?

• penagwin 7y ago
  The other issue is infrared camera's don't have great resolution/refresh rates which isn't great for a (relatively) high altitude fast moving vehicle. That said I'd expect them to be added at some point. More tools rarely hurt.
• syntaxing 7y ago
  Yeah, I would think an infrared camera would work much better for this type of application. Unless HD infrared camera is limited for civilian use?
  • penagwin 7y ago
    Only limited by cost, but they get expensive. You could spend more on just the thermal camera then the rest of the setup pretty easily.
• wildylion 7y ago
  For all I know, sometimes we tried to use FLIR gear with varying success. But even professional military grade FLIR is hard to use in a forest, for example. There was a case when FLIR had been useful, for example in winter rescue from a drifting ice pack, IIRC. Also, Liza Alert is cooperating heavily with the 'Angel' volunteer helicopter rescue service. These guys are amazing heli pilots who volunteered to help with SAR missions. My job as a radio operator involves interoperating with them sometimes :) I'm fairly new and the first time I had to do it I've completely forgotten how to work the pilots, despite being a licensed amateur operator :)
• myself248 7y ago
  If you can see them visually, you can definitely see them thermally. A small corner that might not be visually distinct will be thermally warm. You're spot-on, and drone-ready thermal cameras have been available (but expensive) for some time now. However, even the best thermal cameras are fairly low-resolution -- getting beyond 640x480 generally costs more then a car. So you want to overlay the images, and view them side-by-side, and see if one can tell you something about the other. That workflow could use a lot of improvement. Also, thermal images have some weird artifacts. In visible light, since we've all grown up perceiving it, shadows and reflections are just natural and we don't even notice them anymore. But medium-wave infrared tends to reflect off things we don't think of as reflective, and it confuses a lot of first-time observers. Different surfaces have different emissivity, and tend to take on the apparent temperature of the background or reflected scene, which is often the sky itself, and the temperature of the sky is a whole 'nother topic. These artifacts are so confusing to untrained observers that they've spawned an entire genre of TV shows ("ghost hunters"), and continually trip up new analysts. All that being said, yes, adding thermal cameras can definitely produce more useful data. It just might not be suitable for crowdsourcing.
  • hinkley 7y ago
    You uh... how do I say this... only living people have a thermal signature. There is value in finding a body as far as closure for the family and ending the search. So it would be a matter of whether thermal imaging improves survival rates, because of course finding more people alive is worth more than finding them at all.