Azimuth estimation of distant, approaching airplane in See-and-avoid Systems

Abstract

Visual detection based sense and avoid problem is more and more important nowadays as UAVs are getting closer to entering remotely piloted or autonomously into the airspace. It is critical to gain as much information as possible from the silhouettes of the distant aircrafts. In our paper, we investigate the reachable accuracy of the orientation information of remote planes under different geometrical condition, by identifying their wing lines from their detected wingtips. Under the assumption that the remote airplane is on a straight course, the error of the spatial discretization (pixelization), and the automatic detection error is calculated.