Automated Extraction of Aircraft Runway Patterns from Radar Imagery

摘要

A method is presented to extract linear terrain features from synthetic radarimagery. An input radar image is smoothed with an edge preserving smoothing operation. Edge detection is performed using a sobel operator, and both the magnitude and the directional images are computed. The edges are using a Sobel operator, and both magnitude and the directional images are computed. The edges are strengthened using several iterations of a relaxation operation in which both the magnitude image and the directional image are updated with each iteration. The output of the relaxation operation is a binary ege image, which is thinned. A connected components routine is run in which two passes through the image are used to provide a unique label for each connected component. The connected components related only to the runway pattern are extracted by computing certain properties of each componant. A border-following algorithm is used to follow only the outermost borders and give each of the pixels on an outermost border a maximum brightness value.