Dataset Generation in a Simulated Environment Using Real Flight Data for Reliable Runway Detection Capabilities

Abstract: 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.