Liza Alert: searching missing people using machine vision | Hacker News Reader

Liza Alert: searching missing people using machine vision

habr.com

47 pointsatomlib23 comments

Liza Alert is named after her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizaveta_Glinka

EDIT: Apparently I was wrong.

No, it's not.

> Liza Alert takes its name from 5-year-old Liza Fomkina. In 2010 Liza has died of hypothermia in the Russian wilderness after a 9 day unsuccessful search mission. The foundation was born less than 21 days after Liza's death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liza_Alert

Thank you for the correction, I always assumed it was named after Glinka.

No. The previous commenter is correct.

I'm actually a member of LA and I know the people who are running this project. So far has never read the article and I just know they're trying to automate image processing with ML.

I'm mostly involved with communications (e.g. radio, etc) and generally helping out with their missions if I can.

They asked if I knew drone pilots awhile back too.

Fascinating to see a comment from one of you guys. Any interesting news/insights?

Maybe we could organize a Reddit AMA? I don't know. I'm sitting in front of my office PC now, incidentally, after returning from a night lookout for a missing person.

All I can say, get as much sleep as you can, sleep deprivation is a bch.

And here I thought it was a reference to the Eliza chatterbot.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

I've recently read that they often find missing children drowned in outhouses because a huge portion of people in Russia doesn't have access to normal WCs.

This is a great new retroactive nightmare for me, thanks.

Surely you have a proof of your statement?

E.g. https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ru&tl=en&u=http%3A...

The article says 22.6% of Russians don't have access to central sewage according to the official data and seven children have been found drowned this way in 2018.

Lack of access to central sewage system does not necessarily imply a lack of a "normal WC". This figure includes households which use individual sewage systems ending up in septic tanks or cesspools, and is not significantly larger than 20% of the U.S. households that don't have access to a centralized sewer either: https://nepis.epa.gov/Exe/tiff2png.cgi/P1004624.PNG?-r+75+-g... Of course latrines are a thing in rural Russia and, sadly, children do drown in them, but this article does not support your original claim.

I wouldn't call a rural portion huge, but, sadly this still happens. About 5 known cases in last year

That's not just about the rural, many minor cities have this problem too as far as I know. But I haven't been to there to check myself (and actually hesitate to).

Today, I learned that WC means water closet.

What about an owl or other big bird. Attached with a tiny gps and radio. Trained to push a button or make a sound when they find a human not dressed in search west.

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

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.

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?

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.

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 :)

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com