Hong Kong’s fire services use artificial intelligence to help track down stranded hikers, amid surge in accidents during Covid pandemic
- New software is based on deep learning model and can analyse pictures of countryside taken by drones for human-like objects, department says
- Use of artificial intelligence can speed up review of images, processing about 1,500 photos in around two hours with an accuracy of 65 per cent
Hong Kong’s Fire Services Department is using software featuring artificial intelligence to analyse photos taken by drones to speed up mountain rescue operations amid a surge in hiking accidents as more residents venture outdoors during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The program, which is based on a deep learning model, is trained using thousands of pictures from drones of the city’s landscape and taught to analyse images and identify human-like objects.
The software takes five seconds to process an image and calculate the probability that any humans are in the picture.
Wong Tak-fai, the assistant divisional officer of the department’s tactical support unit, said the software had helped to make their search and rescue operations more efficient, explaining that the program could identify missing hikers faster than manually checking images.
“Traditionally, we have mainly relied on people in our search and rescue operation. But drones can now take photos and send them back, and the software can help us analyse them,” he said.
“We hope the development of this new software will effectively shorten the search time,” Wong said.
Official figures found that the number of mountain search and rescue cases handled by the department had increased to 951 last year from 602 in 2020 and 215 in 2019. The data also showed fire services had responded to 684 incidents during the first nine months of 2022.