Automatic Video System for Aircraft Identification

Advanced Surface Movement Guidance and Control Systems need the identification of aircraft and vehicles in airport movement area. In this work, a video identification algorithm, based on the tail number recognition, is proposed as a part of a global surveillance video system. The aircraft identification problem has to deal with three fundamental aspects: capturing and preprocessing the images, the international regulation defining the tail number grammar and the pattern recognition methodology. Considering these aspects, the developed system is based basically on three ideas: in the first place, to use the local grey level contrast to detect the characters of the tail number; in second place, to find the zone where the tail number is written to isolate it of the rest of the image; and finally to process this zone to identify the aircraft, using an aircraft database.