Rapid Human Body Detection in Disaster Sites Using Image Processing from Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Cameras

The development and impact of technology on our everyday lives cannot be compared with the world our ancestors lived in several decades ago. This is described as the world of technology (WoT). But despite all the advancements in technologies, understanding of the mechanisms of nature and the damages caused via natural disasters, such as earthquakes, landslides, and flooding to mention only a few, are still very far away. In the effort of saving lives during natural disasters, such as earthquakes, this study introduces a rapid human body detection using image processing from UAV camera. The skin color from a female student is first extracted in RGB then converted to HSV. Next, opening and closing morphological operations are performed eight times each to remove all noise present in the image. Experimental tests were performed both indoor and outdoor, where the female student presented an object close and far to the camera to check the detection capability in both cases. The experiment results show that close or far, the camera can clearly detect both a human body and any part of a human body. The results of the experiment proves the merit of the proposed method.