An airport runway centerline location method for one-off aerial imaging system

An airport runway centerline location method is proposed for extracting airport runway in images from one-off aerial imaging system. One-off aerial imaging system captures image at an altitude about one kilometer or below, thus detailed feature of the scenery reveals itself clearly. The proposed method relies on this precondition to detect and locate centerline of airport runway. This method has four steps: edge detection, dominating line orientation extraction, distance histogram building and centerline location. A salient edge detection method is developed with Sobel detector, which could detect edges of runway strips at the disturbance of edges features from surrounding objects. Then, a traditional Hough transform is performed to build a Hough map, within which the dominating line orientation is extracted. After getting the dominating line orientation, a reference straight line is chosen for building distance histogram. This distance histogram is a one-dimensional one, built up with the distance of all edge pixels in the edge map to the reference line. Airport centerline has a three-peak pattern in the one-dimensional distance histogram, and the center peak is corresponding to the centerline of airport runway. Experiments with simulated images show this method could location airport runway centerline effectively.