In this study, researchers investigated the best practices for detecting and processing clandestine human remains with unmanned aerial systems and multispectral remote sensing.
In this study, researchers examined the most appropriate methods for detecting environmental anomalies based on the state of body decomposition, season of search, and weather conditions. The major goals of this project were to develop flexible, scientifically based best practices, protocols, and a user interface to aid search teams searching for clandestine human remains and documenting outdoor death scenes using unmanned ariel systems (UAS). The major objectives were to identify the most common environmental disturbances associated with clandestine remains and to determine the most appropriate bands of the electromagnetic spectrum to detect them. The other major objective was to evaluate state-of-the art tools, identify gaps, and determine where/how algorithms can assist experts in detecting clandestine human remains and the associated environmental anomalies. Since temperature differences can be a key to detecting clandestine remains, researchers worked in collaboration with Unmanned Systems Research who developed the Radiometric Data Toolkit. The findings indicate that detection of human remains is not as simple as flying a UAS with a camera and demonstrate that the protocol used for detecting clandestine remains is highly dependent on how the body was disposed, the season of the year the body was disposed and search for, the decomposition stage of the body, and the local geological and weather conditions. A novel approach to the problem of locating clandestine human remains is to use small remotely controlled aircraft or unmanned aerial systems equipped with appropriate sensors. UASs are an emerging technology that has the potential to revolutionize the search for clandestine human remains. The best practices resulting from this research provide search teams with scientifically based procedures for searching for clandestine remains depending on their location (above or below ground level) and stage of decomposition as well as the season and time of day of the search.
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