快猫短视频

Could seeing with heat and light simultaneously improve search and rescue missions? Nathan Rasmussen of in Provo, Utah, thinks so. He has created a hybrid video system that integrates visible and infrared footage into a single shot.

Search drones already use visible and infrared cameras, but making sense of two videos at once is difficult. Infrared is especially useful when covering large search areas as it picks up heat-signatures, which visible footage doesn鈥檛 show. But its lack of geographical information makes it tricky to interpret.

So Rasmussen has devised a way to calibrate the feeds from two such cameras attached to a model aircraft. To do this, he first filmed a grid of black wires on a white background using both cameras. To allow the infrared camera to 鈥渟ee鈥� the wires, a current was sent down them to heat them up.

Rasmussen then created an algorithm to align the vertices of the grids, as seen by the two cameras, to compensate for the slight differences in viewing angle.

Hot pink

When recorded in a natural setting, the warmer areas picked up by the infrared camera appear magenta on the hybrid video stream. This is because magenta is rare in natural environments.

To test whether the hybrid video would aid search and rescue teams, Rasmussen asked volunteers to watch either his hybrid stream or the two separate visible and infrared feeds. The volunteers were also played a series of beeps.

While both groups were able to pick out objects in the footage, those watching the hybrid stream were more accurate in reporting the number of beeps they had heard. This suggests that the hybrid video is easier to interpret, says Rasmussen. 鈥淚n a search and rescue situation, you can鈥檛 miss pieces of data,鈥� he says.

Tom Jensen, a spokesman for , an organisation that helps coordinate aerial searches, says that being able to see the output of both cameras on the same screen in real-time would be 鈥減retty slick鈥�.

The findings were presented at the Applications of Computer Vision conference in Snowbird, Utah, in December.