Facilitation of air traffic control via optical character recognition-based aircraft registration number extraction

To identify any aircraft in the world, it is sufficient to read its registration number. This number is a unique identifier, and offers valuable information, in the same way a car registration number does. In this work, the authors present the results of their feasibility study towards a simple, yet very efficient and effective system to identify aircrafts using video-optical character recognition acquired by off-the-shelf cameras. They used several videos under realistic conditions at the Heraklion airport during high season and they achieved very promising results. They claim that there is much room for the development of a low-cost airport surface monitoring system based on standard cameras, which can complement high-cost radars.