Unmanned Aerial Vehicle with Human Detection and People Counter Using YOLO v5 and Thermal Camera for Search Operations

When a disaster or accident occurs, the first thing that must be done is search operations; this must be done carefully and discretely using a well-defined procedure. Its purpose is to help people who are in immediate danger. However, conducting search operations by a person, especially in a risky location, is not safe due to limited equipment and dangerous scenarios. This study developed an Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) prototype that captures even with an overview head image for the search operation and detects humans in the image. After detecting the presence of a human in an image, the prototype counts the actual people in the frame and displays the total number of people discovered in real time. Suppose the same person was detected twice but in a different frame, it will be still counted on the overall person counts. In object detection, You Only Look Once Version 5 (YOLOv5) is used as an algorithm. Thermal camera will be added for more accurate results from the detected person.