High-resolution thermal infrared dataset for airborne person detection in SAR missions

The utilization of uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in search and rescue (SAR) operations has become increasingly prevalent because the deployment of UAVs is expected to facilitate a higher degree of operational flexibility while simultaneously reducing costs. Currently, commercially available UAVs can be equipped with low-resolution thermal infrared (IR) cameras with typical resolutions of 640 × 512 pixels, which generally are evaluated manually by the SAR teams during an operation. Automatic person detection in IR images still remains a challenge. The objective of the proposed AIResQ dataset is to significantly enhance the performance of object detectors in the IR domain, employed in SAR operations for missing and potentially injured persons. AIResQ comprises 9,788 IR images with a resolution of up to 2048 × 1536 pixels captured from drone perspectives with a handheld camera under varying weather conditions and in different terrains. Additionally, AIResQ displays persons in atypical poses. In order to test new object detectors in the context of SAR, we established a benchmark dataset stemming from exercises with real drone flights together with SAR organizations.