ForestPersons: A Large-Scale Dataset for Under-Canopy Missing Person Detection

TL;DR

ForestPersons is a large-scale, under-canopy dataset designed to improve missing person detection in forest environments, addressing limitations of aerial imagery and supporting SAR efforts.

Contribution

The paper introduces ForestPersons, a comprehensive dataset with diverse images and annotations for under-canopy person detection, filling a critical gap in SAR research.

Findings

Standard detection models perform poorly on ForestPersons.

The dataset reveals the need for specialized detection methods for under-canopy scenarios.

ForestPersons enables development of more effective SAR detection algorithms.

Abstract

Detecting missing persons in forest environments remains a challenge, as dense canopy cover often conceals individuals from detection in top-down or oblique aerial imagery typically captured by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). While UAVs are effective for covering large, inaccessible areas, their aerial perspectives often miss critical visual cues beneath the forest canopy. This limitation underscores the need for under-canopy perspectives better suited for detecting missing persons in such environments. To address this gap, we introduce ForestPersons, a novel large-scale dataset specifically designed for under-canopy person detection. ForestPersons contains 96,482 images and 204,078 annotations collected under diverse environmental and temporal conditions. Each annotation includes a bounding box, pose, and visibility label for occlusion-aware analysis. ForestPersons provides ground-level and low-altitude perspectives that closely reflect the visual conditions encountered by Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) during forest Search and Rescue (SAR) missions. Our baseline evaluations reveal that standard object detection models, trained on prior large-scale object detection datasets or SAR-oriented datasets, show limited performance on ForestPersons. This indicates that prior benchmarks are not well aligned with the challenges of missing person detection under the forest canopy. We offer this benchmark to support advanced person detection capabilities in real-world SAR scenarios. The dataset is publicly available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/etri/ForestPersons.