Real-time runway detection for infrared aerial image using synthetic vision and an ROI based level set method

Abstract

We present a new method for real-time runway detection embedded in synthetic vision and an ROI (Region of Interest) based level set method. A virtual runway from synthetic vision provides a rough region of an infrared runway. A three-thresholding segmentation is proposed following Otsu's binarization method to extract a runway subset from this region, which is used to construct an initial level set function. The virtual runway also gives a reference area of the actual runway in an infrared image, which helps us design a stopping criterion for the level set method. In order to meet the needs of real-time processing, the ROI based level set evolution framework is implemented in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient and accurate.