Automatic extraction of runway structures in infrared remote sensing image sequences

Abstract

Today’s flight safety, especially during aircraft landing approach to an airport, is often affected by adverse weather conditions. One of the promising technologies to increase the pilot’s situation awareness is the Enhanced and Synthetic Vision System (ESVS): the combination of sensor vision and synthetic vision systems. In this paper we present one aspect of the sensor vision system, an algorithm that is using only a sequence of infrared images to detect possible runway structures and obstacles on it during the aircraft landing approach. No additional information from database, INS or GPS is used at this processing stage. The algorithm generates several runway and obstacle hypotheses and the final decision in ESVS is taken in the further processing stage: fusion of radar and IR data hypotheses and synthetic vision data. The functionality of the algorithm was tested extensively during several flight campaigns with landing approaches to different German and European airports in 2003 and 2004.