Aircraft Classification Using Image Processing Techniques and Artificial Neural Networks

Identifying the type of an approaching aircraft, should it be a helicopter, a fighter jet or a passenger plane, is an important task in both military and civilian practices. The task in question is normally done by using radar or RF signals. In this study, we suggest an alternative method that introduces the use of a still image instead of RF or radar data. The image was transformed to a binary black and white image, using a Matlab script which utilizes Image Processing Toolbox commands of Matlab, in order to extract the necessary features. The extracted image data of four different types of aircraft was fed into a three-layered feed forward artificial neural network for classification. Satisfactory results were achieved as the rate of successful classification turned out to be 97% on average.

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