Deep Learning Empowered Wearable-Based Behavior Recognition for Search and Rescue Dogs.

Journal: Sensors (Basel, Switzerland)
Published Date:

Abstract

Search and Rescue (SaR) dogs are important assets in the hands of first responders, as they have the ability to locate the victim even in cases where the vision and or the sound is limited, due to their inherent talents in olfactory and auditory senses. In this work, we propose a deep-learning-assisted implementation incorporating a wearable device, a base station, a mobile application, and a cloud-based infrastructure that can first monitor in real-time the activity, the audio signals, and the location of a SaR dog, and second, recognize and alert the rescuing team whenever the SaR dog spots a victim. For this purpose, we employed deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) both for the activity recognition and the sound classification, which are trained using data from inertial sensors, such as 3-axial accelerometer and gyroscope and from the wearable's microphone, respectively. The developed deep learning models were deployed on the wearable device, while the overall proposed implementation was validated in two discrete search and rescue scenarios, managing to successfully spot the victim (i.e., obtained F1-score more than 99%) and inform the rescue team in real-time for both scenarios.

Authors

  • Panagiotis Kasnesis
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of West Attica, 12244 Athens, Greece.
  • Vasileios Doulgerakis
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of West Attica, 12244 Athens, Greece.
  • Dimitris Uzunidis
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of West Attica, 12244 Athens, Greece.
  • Dimitris G Kogias
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of West Attica, 12244 Athens, Greece.
  • Susana I Funcia
    Spanish School of Rescue and Detection with Dogs (ESDP), 28524 Madrid, Spain.
  • Marta B González
    Spanish School of Rescue and Detection with Dogs (ESDP), 28524 Madrid, Spain.
  • Christos Giannousis
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of West Attica, 12244 Athens, Greece.
  • Charalampos Z Patrikakis
    Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of West Attica, 12244 Athens, Greece.