Facilitation of Air Traffic Control via OCR-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 we present the results of our 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. We used several videos under realistic conditions at the Heraklion airport during high-season and we achieved very promising results. We 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.