Last week, 
and 
magazines reported on a recovery operation led by the Piedmont Alpine Rescue team, part of the Italian Mountain Rescue Corps (CNSAS), on Monviso, the highest peak in the Cottian Alps. Nearly a year after a 64-year-old mountaineer went missing, CNSAS drone pilots Saverio Isola and Giorgio Viana and their team located his body using AI analysis of thousands of drone images.
During the search, the team used both Eagle Eyes and ADIAT by TexSAR. As the CNSAS pilots later told the Eagle Eyes team, Eagle Eyes was crucial in rapidly analysing thousands of drone images in just a few hours, detecting a subtle color anomaly that turned out to be the mountaineer’s helmet; ADIAT was then used to verify the finding. At Eagle Eyes, we are honoured that our technology was part of this mission and proud to have helped provide closure to the family of the missing mountaineer in this tragic situation.
Location of Monviso in the Italian Alps
Monviso, also known as Monte Viso, is a striking landmark sometimes mentioned as a possible inspiration for the Paramount Pictures logo. The mission took place on the mountain’s rugged north face, in a steep couloir above a hanging glacier. Search teams had previously been unable to locate any sign of the missing man. After launching two drones to capture thousands of images across a 183-hectare area, the CNSAS drone team processed the imagery with Eagle Eyes, which flagged a small cluster of red colored pixels from the mountaineer’s helmet hidden among rocks.
Example of an Eagle Eyes Color Detection
Photo Source: Eagle Eyes Search
Weather delayed the response the next day, but early the following morning the team flew back to the site and visually confirmed the helmet with a drone flyover, guided by the GPS coordinates provided by the Eagle Eyes detection software. The body was later recovered with assistance from emergency services.
AI-Powered, Computer Vision Drone Search: From Weeks to Hours
In traditional ground or manual photo review efforts, such a search could have taken weeks. The use of Eagle Eyes for rapid detection, narrowed it down to hours. As pilot Isola told Wired Italia, “It’s a human achievement, but without technology, it would have been an impossible mission. It’s a team success.”
Monviso at Sunset
Monviso (3,841m) west face lit by sunset in winter seen from Colle del Longet (2750m). Photo by Carmine Bonanni, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International. Source: Wikimedia Commons
Piedmont’s Alpine Rescue team has been developing and refining AI-based drone search and rescue methods for over a year, combining thermal sensors, high-resolution cameras, and Eagle Eyes computer vision detection. Eagle Eyes helps rescuers detect subtle visual clues in aerial imagery across vast and complex terrain that might otherwise be missed. These detections can be effortlessly shared to team maps (eg. CalTopo) while the drone is still in the air, in this case helping provide closure to a long and difficult search.
Read the full articles:
: “Drones and AI found a missing hiker on Monviso”
: “Artificial Intelligence Helped Rescuers Find a Climber’s Remains”
15 August 2025, by Patrick Robinson