A method of automatic finding airport runways in aerial images

This paper presents an automatic method to find runways of the airports in aerial images. Firstly, we design the model of a runway based on its characteristics. Then, we find the runway in a hypothesis and test paradigm. Hypotheses are formed by looking for instances of long rectangular shapes. Runway intensity and intensity contrast between runway and background are used to verify our hypotheses. Finally, the hypothesis that is supported by verification is believed to be the runway. Many experiments confirm that this method can find runways of airports exactly and quickly in aerial images.