Write code for responders to use in searching for missing persons and win prize money! Small UAS are becoming more common in searching for missing persons, either those swept away by a flood or storm surge or individuals who have gotten lost in the wilderness. <But a small UAS flying over a wilderness area can produce over 800 images a day that responders have to manually inspect for signs of a missing person. This can take over 22 hours, increasing the chance that an injured hiker or flood victim would not be found in time. 

Add to the Computer Vision Emergency Response Toolkit. Many straightforward algorithms exist that could help responders screen or inspect the images. But these algorithms are not in one place, they run in the Cloud, or are designed for someone with a degree in computer science and a lot of time to figure out. Well, that doesn’t work! So CRASAR and HRAIL created the Computer Vision Emergency Response Toolkit (CVERT) with funding from the National Science Foundation to be a one-stop-shopping, one-user-interface program that responders could download and run on their MS Window laptops in the field. CVERT is general purpose, but this competition is about adding algorithms that we know will benefit missing person searches. (You can write code for other types of incidents, too, but we don’t have prizes for that, just gratitude.)