CHENNAI: A group of students at SRM University led by Sobin Santhosh, final year student in the Aerospace department have designed and implemented an autonomous copter equipped with an automatic face and person recognition system in a day. In their drill experiment of the rescue application, an onboard camera was mounted on a quad-copter UAV where a live video was recorded. The video was fed to the person identification software, developed on a MATLAB platform by Arijit Ray, a final year student of SRM University in the Electrical and Electronics Department. The software successfully detected the target person in an image taken while the copter has hovering. Several images of the target individual were taken in different postures, angles and backdrops to ensure that the software has a robust accuracy. The GPS location of the snapshot image was also transmitted to the ground station and it conformed exactly to the location at which the snapshot was taken.
According to Arijit Ray, “Computer vision equipped copters have unprecedented applications to change the world, ranging from rescue operations in the most inaccessible of places to smart surveillance and security in the most complex and dynamic of environments.” According to Dr Narayana Rao, the Director of Research at SRM University, “Autonomous Copters have potential applications such as surveillance, aerial photography and also have various strategic applications.” The Autonomous Copter is a type of unmanned aerial vehicle that can fly without human intervention, said a press release.