Citation

Giesbrecht GG, Patel M, Javid R, Murray S, Patel V, Wiens N, Xie D, Jeffrey I, Ferguson P. Forensic Sci. Res. 2023; ePub(ePub): ePub.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1093/fsr/owad040

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Every year, people drown after falling through ice on rivers and lakes. In some cases, the body of the victim floats up to the underside of the ice, making detection and recovery difficult using traditional search methods with divers. A robust and contactless sensing system is required to locate drowning victims that does not put rescue teams at risk of falling through the ice themselves. In this paper, we demonstrate the feasibility of a Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) for detecting deceased drowning victims that have floated up to the underside of the ice. We placed three euthanized pigs simulating drowning victims under ice ranging in thickness from 5 cm to 26 cm. We dragged a GPR at 500 MHz and 1 GHz across the ice to detect the simulated victims using an autocorrelation-based detection technique.

RESULTS showed that both frequencies were able to detect the rough shape of the simulated victims at ice thicknesses up to 42 cm, with the 1 GHz data showing slightly more resolution than the 500 MHz data. These results show promise and suggest future development of an autonomous drone-based GPR detection system.

Language: en