Pervasive 3D Reconstruction to Identify Hidden 3D Survival Spaces for Search and Rescue Management

Abstract

Efficient management of urban search and rescue is a very important field for our society. This is mainly due to the fact that efficient management directly affects peoples' lives. Currently, ICT tools have been investigated for an efficient operation of urban search and rescue, such as robotic technologies or pervasive sensors able to capture the current situation awareness of a collapsing event. It is clear that 3D information is an essential element in efficient managing of urban search and rescue, since it models the geometry of the collapsing scene. Additionally, 3D models are combined with structural simulators in order to identify the best parameters causing a building collapse. In this way, hidden or internal survival spaces are able to be identified by matching the captured 3D models (they represent the current, actual conditions of a collapse) with those generated by the structural simulators (they predict of how a building should be collapsed based on structural parameters). In this way, 3D survival spaces are involved, which is salient information for managing urban search and rescue operations. This paper presents the results of the European Funded project, named INACHUS, “Technological and Methodological Solutions for Integrated Wide Area Situation Awareness and Survivor Localization to Support Search and Rescue”. It mainly describes the 3D modelling framework used to capture the geometry of the collapsing scene and to identify the 3D hidden survival spaces by comparing the actual captured with the structural simulated 3D meshes. It also describes a visualization engine toolkit used= for depicting the collapsing scene in 3D domain, improving the decision making of the civil protection agencies.