Optag - a Combined Panoramic Photogrammetric and Radio Frequency Tagging System for Monitoring Passenger Movements in Airports

Up to five percent of aircraft departure delays are caused by late passengers or late bags at a gate, and the impact of this in missed slots and subsequent cost will increase as the number of flights increases. This paper describes the development of a combined real time panoramic imaging system, capable of photogrammetric measurement, with a new long range radio frequency tagging system that is directed towards the real time monitoring of passengers within an airport environment. The system is designed to enable the immediate location of checked in passengers who are either missing or late, and thus reduce passenger-induced delays and speed up aircraft turn around. The paper introduces the overall design of the system and reports on the capabilities of a newly developed twelve mega pixel panoramic imaging system that has been designed to deliver calibrated panoramic images and high resolution targeted views at frame rates of up to twelve fps over an Ethernet network. The camera is composed of eight sensors that must be individually calibrated in order that their individual images can be geometrically corrected and stitched together in real time. Detail is given concerning some of the camera calibration processing carried out and the observed consistency in imaging geometry between sensors following their manufacture and subsequent alignment using optical bench techniques.