Aircraft push back direction indicator

One of the common ramp activities in an airport is the push-back operation. It involves an aircraft being pushed back off the airport terminal gates (in the apron area) and aligning it towards a taxiway leading to the designated runway prior to departure. The aircraft is assigned a designated taxiway depending on traffic conditions and once the aircraft is aligned with the corresponding taxiway, the taxiway is activated for taxing using ground lighting. There is a need to automatically identify the direction of the aircraft alignment after pushback so as to ensure correct alignment and also to activate the corresponding taxiway. In this paper, a novel real-time solution is proposed for automatically detecting the aircraft pushback direction time using feeds from existing video cameras installed at the gates. The algorithm achieves this objective by obtaining the most stable and significant optical flows from the scene sequence using motion-based segmentation and simultaneous calculation of their orientation direction. Algorithm is designed to perform well during day/nightconditions, in deteriorating climatic conditions with very poor visibility and at low resolution (160×120) and low fps (less than 5 fps).