Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play an important role in numerous technical and scientific fields, especially in wilderness rescue. This paper carries out work on real-time UAV human detection and recognition of body and hand rescue gestures. We use body-featuring solutions to establish biometric communications, like yolo3-tiny for human detection. When the presence of a person is detected, the system will enter the gesture recognition phase, where the user and the drone can communicate briefly and effectively, avoiding the drawbacks of speech communication. A data-set of ten body rescue gestures (i.e., Kick, Punch, Squat, Stand, Attention, Cancel, Walk, Sit, Direction, and PhoneCall) has been created by a UAV on-board camera. The two most important gestures are the novel dynamic Attention and Cancel which represent the set and reset functions respectively. When the rescue gesture of the human body is recognized as Attention, the drone will gradually approach the user with a larger resolution for hand gesture recognition. The system achieves 99.80% accuracy on testing data in body gesture data-set and 94.71% accuracy on testing data in hand gesture data-set by using the deep learning method. Experiments conducted on real-time UAV cameras confirm our solution can achieve our expected UAV rescue purpose.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) vision technology is becoming increasingly important, especially in wilderness rescue. For humans in the wilderness with poor network conditions and bad weather, this paper proposes a technique for road extraction and road condition detection from video captured by UAV multispectral cameras in real-time or pre-downloaded multispectral images from satellites, which in turn provides humans with optimal route planning. Additionally, depending on the flight altitude of the UAV, humans can interact with the UAV through dynamic gesture recognition to identify emergency situations and potential dangers for emergency rescue or re-routing. The purpose of this work is to detect the road condition and identify emergency situations in order to provide necessary and timely assistance to humans in the wild. By obtaining a normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI), the UAV can effectively distinguish between bare soil roads and gravel roads, refining the results of our previous route planning data. In the low-altitude human–machine interaction part, based on media-pipe hand landmarks, we combined machine learning methods to build a dataset of four basic hand gestures for sign for help dynamic gesture recognition. We tested the dataset on different classifiers, and the best results show that the model can achieve 99.99% accuracy on the testing set. In this proof-of-concept paper, the above experimental results confirm that our proposed scheme can achieve our expected tasks of UAV rescue and route planning.