Aircraft recognition via geometric reasoning

This paper presents an aircraft recognition system, which addresses realistic concerns resulting from the imaging process and the environment surrounding the aircraft. The system employs a bottom up approach, where recognition begins by extracting low level features (e.g., lines), which are subsequently combined into more complex sets of line groupings representing parts of an aircraft, as viewed from a generic viewpoint. Knowledge about aircraft is represented in the form of whole/part shape description and the connectedness property, and is embedded in production rules, which primarily aim at finding instances of the aircraft parts in the image and checking the connectedness property between the parts. The system has demonstrated robustness against occlusion, shadows, excessive background clutter and many forms of image degradation.