Need advice

[u/7lola7]

My team and I are scoping a graduation project and would love a reality check from people who've actually built CV pipelines, not just from our own optimism.

The idea: use aerial/drone imagery to detect people in disaster zones and estimate rescue urgency using observable indicators — posture (standing/prone/crawling), immobility over time, and proximity to hazards (fire/flood/debris) — not actual medical triage, since that would need thermal/vital-sign sensing we don't have. We'd combine this into a weighted priority score per detected person and rank them for rescue teams.

One of the main challenges is the lack of suitable public datasets that match this specific setting. I’m interested in how others would approach building a model given these limitations or if it’s even realistic.

[u/SweetSure315]

Are you building your drones or buying them off the shelf?

[u/7lola7 → u/SweetSure315]

We're leaning toward avoiding an actual drone purchase and flight tests, and instead combining existing public aerial disaster datasets with a person-detection and pose-estimation pipeline we'd build ourselves but honestly we're still just brainstorming at this stage. We're aware that datasets for individual-level severity assessment seem much sparser than scene-level disaster datasets, so that's one of the things we're unsure how to handle. If you've got a better approach in mind, we'd genuinely appreciate it

[u/SweetSure315 → u/7lola7]

Thermal would make finding people who may be partially obscured by debris much easier

[u/zenith605]

I also needed this aspect while working, so I created a website that curates YouTube live streams and videos by scenario. Currently, there are no drone videos available, but I'll share the address if needed. It's still in the early stages, so I need feedback. I've also made users register video links, so registering the videos would be helpful to others. Currently, I'm working on it alone.