Gesture Recognition for UCAV-N Flight Deck Operations

Abstract : How can unmanned air vehicles be transitioned seamlessly into carrier operations alongside legacy manned aircraft? One way be through automatic recognition of the flight deck director's gestures to the aircraft. If a system could automatically recognize and respond to the director's signals (e.g. "come forward", "left", "right", "stop") just like a pilot would, then unmanned aircraft could be integrated onto the flight deck with minimal impact to operations or training. This report defines the problem of computer vision and gesture recognition on the, carrier flight deck, and discusses technical issues and describes conditions in engineering terms (how fast, how far, where, how dark, min/max, variance) sufficient to select sensors and approaches with high likelihood of success.