Smart India Hackathon 2022 · DRDO
Drowning Detection
Computer-vision system that detects drowning in real time. Won SIH 2022. Published in IEEE.
- Role
- Team lead — Rank 1 nationally
- Period
- 2022
#1
National rank, Smart India Hackathon 2022
- Computer Vision
- Python
- IEEE
- DRDO
The problem statement
DRDO’s brief: detect a person drowning, in real time, from video — early enough that the detection is useful rather than forensic.
Drowning does not look like drowning. It is quiet, mostly vertical, and lasts under a minute. The naive approach — flag people who stop moving — produces a false positive for everyone floating on their back.
The approach
We modelled the instinctive drowning response rather than “absence of movement”: the characteristic vertical body position, arms pressing laterally against the water, no supporting kick, and head tilted back at the waterline. Those are separable in pose data in a way that “not swimming” is not.
The system tracked pose across frames and scored the trajectory, not the frame — which is what kept the false-positive rate low enough to be trusted.
The outcome
Rank 1 nationally at Smart India Hackathon 2022, out of the full national field, on the DRDO problem statement.
The work was subsequently published in IEEE.