Due to harsh conditions of disaster areas, understanding of current feature of collapsed buildings, terrain, and other infrastructures is critical issue for disaster managers. However, because of difficulties in acquiring the geographical information of the disaster site such as large disaster site and limited capability of rescue workers, comprehensive site investigation of current location of survivors buried under the remains of the building is not an easy task for disaster managers. To overcome these circumstances of disaster site, this study makes use of an unmanned aerial vehicle, commonly known as a drone to effectively acquire current image data from the large disaster areas. The framework of 3D model reconstruction of disaster site using aerial imagery acquired by drones was also presented. The proposed methodology is expected to assist rescue workers and disaster managers in achieving a rapid and accurate identification of survivors under the collapsed building.
This work was supported by National Research Foundation of Korea grant funded by the Korean Government (NRF-2014R1A1A2056217) and "Development of Collapsed Shape Information Acquisition and Buried Human Detection Technology in Disaster Area" project funded by Korea Institute of Civil Engineering and Building Technology (KICT).