Automatic video system for aircraft identification

Advanced surface movement guidance and control systems need the identification of aircraft and vehicles in airport movement areas. In this work, a video identification algorithm based on 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, international regulations defining tail number grammar, and pattern recognition methodology. Considering these aspects, the developed system is based on three ideas: using the local grey level contrast to detect characters of the tail number; finding the zone where the fail number is written to isolate it from the rest of the image; and processing this zone to identify the aircraft, using an aircraft database.