Real-Time Optical Aircraft Detection

Abstract

The routine use of Uninhabited Air Systems (UAS) in non-segregated airspace presents many technological and regulatory challenges to the aerospace industry. This paper gives an overview of the collision avoidance problem facing UAS designers and provides a discussion of the current optical aircraft detection and tracking approaches. In addition, the paper describes several important challenges for a computer vision based aircraft detection approach that is designed to form part of an optical UAS collision avoidance system. Some initial flight trial results are presented from our prototype and conclusions drawn.