
Liza Alert: searching missing people using machine vision - atomlib
https://habr.com/en/company/mailru/blog/446974/
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aportnoy
Liza Alert is named after her:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizaveta_Glinka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizaveta_Glinka)

EDIT: Apparently I was wrong.

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oytis
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liza_Alert)

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

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wildylion
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.

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

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wildylion
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 b __ch.

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qwerty456127
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.

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

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qwerty456127
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).

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z3t4
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.

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jon889
Wouldn't infrared cameras work better? Or does the forest blocks a persons
heat?

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myself248
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.

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hinkley
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.

