Advances in hardware and pattern recognition techniques, along with the widespread utilization of remote sensing satellites, have urged the development of automatic target detection systems. Automatic detection of airports is particularly essential, due to the strategic importance of these targets. In this thesis, a detection method is proposed for airport runways, which is the most distinguishing element of an airport. This method, which operates on large optical satellite images, is composed of a segmentation process based on textural properties, and a runway shape detection stage. In the segmentation process, several local textural features are extracted including not only low level features such as mean, standard deviation of image intensity and gradient, but also Zernike Moments, Circular-Mellin Features, Haralick Features, as well as features involving Gabor Filters, Wavelets and Fourier Power Spectrum Analysis. Since the subset of the mentioned features, which have a role in the discrimination of airport runways from other structures and landforms, cannot be predicted, Adaboost learning algorithm is employed for both classification and determining the feature subset, due to its feature selector nature. By means of the features chosen in this way, a coarse representation of possible runway locations is obtained, as a result of the segmentation operation. Subsequently, the runway shape detection stage, based on a novel form of Hough Transform, is performed over the possible runway locations, in order to obtain final runway positions. The proposed algorithm is examined with experimental work using a comprehensive data set consisting of large and high resolution satellite images and successful results are achieved.

An expert system is useful when conventional programming techniques fall short of capturing human expert knowledge and making decisions using this information. In this study, we describe a framework for capturing expert knowledge under a decision tree form and this framework can be used for making decisions based on captured knowledge. The framework proposed in this study is generic and can be used to create domain specific expert systems for different problems. Features are created or processed by the nodes of decision tree and a final conclusion is reached for each feature. Framework supplies 3 types of nodes to construct a decision tree. First type is the decision node, which guides the search path with its answers. Second type is the operator node, which creates new features using the inputs. Last type of node is the end node, which corresponds to a conclusion about a feature. Once the nodes of the tree are developed, then user can interactively create the decision tree and run the supplied inference engine to collect the result on a specific problem. The framework proposed is experimented with two case studies / &quot / Airport Runway Detection in High Resolution Satellite Images&quot / and &quot / Urban Area Detection in High Resolution Satellite Images&quot / . In these studies linear features are used for structural decisions and Scale Invariant Feature Transform (SIFT) features are used for testing existence of man made structures.

Implementing object detection methods for runway detection during landing approaches is limited in the safety-critical aircraft domain. This limitation is due to the difficulty that comes with verification of the design and the ability to understand how the object detection behaves during operation. During operation, object detection needs to consider the aircraft's position, environmental factors, different runways and aircraft attitudes. Training such an object detection model requires a comprehensive dataset that defines the features mentioned above. The feature's impact on the detection capabilities needs to be analysed to ensure the correct distribution of images in the dataset. Gathering images for these scenarios would be costly and needed due to the aviation industry's safety standards. Synthetic data can be used to limit the cost and time required to create a dataset where all features occur. By using synthesised data in the form of generating datasets in a simulated environment, these features could be applied to the dataset directly. The features could also be implemented separately in different datasets and compared to each other to analyse their impact on the object detections capabilities. By utilising this method for the features mentioned above, the following results could be determined. For object detection to consider most landing cases and different runways, the dataset needs to replicate real flight data and generate additional extreme landing cases. The dataset also needs to consider landings at different altitudes, which can differ at a different airport. Environmental conditions such as clouds and time of day reduce detection capabilities far from the runway, while attitude and runway appearance reduce it at close range. Runway appearance did also affect the runway at long ranges but only for darker runways.