Airport FOD Detection Research On Runway

FOD is the acronym for Foreign Object Debris, which refers to some foreign substances that may damage aircraft, often called runway foreign body. The common variety of FOD objects include remnant of aircraft, machine tools, stone, wood, plastic products and so on. Currently, FOD detection system has been successfully developed overseas, mainly through the radar, infrared, visible light technology to achieve the detection of the targets, locating, identifying, recording and processing, but there is not yet any report about radar detection system in China.The needs of radar detection system ware detailed analysed to detect FOD on the airport runway in this dissertation, at the same time to achieve foreign body localization. Firstly the software design and development of FOD detection system is introduced, including system framework and implementation module. Among them, the software design focuses on the key technology and difficulty, and the corresponding solution is put forward. Secondly, the key technology of FOD detection system is the radar image processing, which receives radar image and processes it to realized FOD detection, and it also can get the real-time coordinates in order to clean up the target on the runway. Finally, the main difficulty of Radar-based FOD detection system on airport runway is the separation of radar image speckle noise from the FOD target, so a image processing solution is proposed in this dissertation, namely, Marker-Based Watershed.Experimental results show that system can effectively detect foreign object debris and locate it on the runway.The design of FOD detection system and digital image processing module are implementation is this dissertation. The main job is shown as following:1) The system software functional requirements of the FOD detection was carefully analysed, also the global design of the software system and module planning are realized.2) A great deal of scientific information and related papers on radar image processing have read and analyzed, and a detailed analysis was done to the main algorithm. A suited processing algorithm of the airport runway image was selected, which was the combination of Morphological Opening and Closing with Reconstruction operations and Marker-Based Watershed image segmentation algorithm. The detection results of a variety of algorithms were compared. 3) Based on Microsoft Visual C++6.0 platform, we developed image processing module with VC language, and the experimental results show that the system can effectively detect FOD and locate it in the runway.