Automated Video-Based Air Traffic Surveillance System for Counting General Aviation Aircraft Operations at Non-Towered Airports

The vast majority of U.S. airports are not equipped with control towers, which limits their ability to keep records of flight operations. Attempts have been made to use sensor-based technologies to count aircraft operations at non-towered airports; however, they exhibit limited accuracy. To this end, we developed an automated video-based surveillance system capable of detecting general aviation aircraft departure and landing operations, which comprise the vast majority of operations at non-towered airports. The proposed computer vision method is comprised of three modules: aircraft detection, aircraft tracking, and operations count and classification. We explored different camera layouts and state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning methods to determine the best settings to extract operations trajectory features for operations count and classification. The proposed method was tested at five non-towered airports. Integrating deep-neural-network-based aircraft detectors and image-correlation-based aircraft trackers achieved an accuracy of about 95%, while ensuring processing times that are needed for real-time implementation.