Luca Morandini, currently a research assistant at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering, Politecnico di Milano, won the 'Mauro Meroni' master's degree award for his thesis 'Anomaly Detection from Aerial Images for Search and Rescue Missions', written under the supervision of Prof. Piero Fraternali.
The award is awarded by the Politecnico di Milano to the best master's theses among those dealing with issues related to the development of innovative solutions for mountain sports and/or the valorisation, sustainability, attractiveness and safety of high-altitude settlements and mountain territories.
In his thesis, Luca Morandini addresses the increasing number of accidents in mountainous areas, necessitating specialized rescue operations, and proposes the use of computer vision algorithms and artificial intelligence to automate the scanning of drone-captured images and videos, thus reducing the manual workload and potential errors of rescue teams. More specifically, the thesis aims to develop an intelligent algorithm to quickly scan thermal videos, highlighting potential victim locations. The proposed deep learning model already showed promising results and the collaboration with rescue agencies ensures the realism and effectiveness of the developed system.