Identification of Drowning Victims in Freshwater Bodies using Drift Prediction and Image Processing based on Deep Learning

Abstract

Year after year drowning deaths are increasing tremendously, making it the 3rd leading cause of unintentional injury deaths worldwide. Drift prediction methodology is typically not used in river ecosystems and conventional methods for human rescue do not account for feasible and faster human detection. Utilization of multiple sensor data in underwater human rescue applications can capacitate faster human detection. This paper discusses the design, implementation, and testing of such an underwater human detection system, which spots the victim drifting or drowning in freshwater ecosystems. The water flow sensor attached to this portable device can calculate drift distance to track down the victim. The ultrasonic sensor activates the underwater camera upon detecting an object, to facilitate real-time human localization. We performed real-time object detection on a custom dataset by applying DarkNet-53 pre-trained weights on YOLOv3 architecture and a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 98.0% was achieved. The system attained a detection depth of 5m. Combined action of drift distance calculator and YOLOv3 real-time detection model can speed up underwater human extrication.