Runway detection in an image sequence

This paper is concerned with rapid detection of the runway in an image sequence captured from a landing aircraft. During the critical section of landing maneuvers, a vision system which can continuously detect the runway is very useful to both enhance the landing safety and reduce the pilots' workload. Such a system requires fast and reliable recognition strategies in order to meet the real-time flight control demands. In this paper, a method based on defining the regions of interest (ROIs) in the image plane is described for achieving such real-time performance. This method utilizes the approximate information about the aircraft/camera position and orientation to obtain a two-dimensional (2D) projection of the runway on the image plane. This 2D projection is represented by a set of regions called the ROIs, with each ROI corresponding to one feature of the three-dimensional (3D) runway model. We show that using such a technique, the computational complexity of the recognition process can be significantly reduced.