Runway detection in High Resolution remote sensing data

Abstract

Runways are vital descriptive features of airports and knowledge of their location is important to many aviation and military applications. With the recent wide availability of remote sensing data, there is demand for an automatic process of extracting runway geometry from satellite imagery. In particular, Very High Resolution (VHR) data makes it feasible to extract a runway's area precisely. In this paper we establish a novel method for accurate and precise extraction of geometric polygons for an arbitrary number of runways in VHR remote sensing imagery. Validated results are demonstrated for a dataset of twelve images of six different airports, at 61 cm resolution from the QuickBird II satellite.