The Aircraft Pose Estimation Based on a Convolutional Neural Network

The pose estimation of the aircraft in the airport plays an important role in preventing collisions and constructing the real-time scene of the airport. However, current airport target surveillance methods regard the aircraft as a point, neglecting the importance of pose estimation. Inspired by human pose estimation, this paper presents an aircraft pose estimation method based on a convolutional neural network through reconstructing the two-dimensional skeleton of an aircraft. Firstly, the key points of an aircraft and the matching relationship are defined to design a 2D skeleton of an aircraft. Secondly, a convolutional neural network is designed to predict all key points and components of the aircraft kept in the confidence maps and the Correlation Fields, respectively. Thirdly, all key points are coarsely matched based on the matching relationship and then refined through the Correlation Fields. Finally, the 2D skeleton of an aircraft is reconstructed. To overcome the lack of benchmark dataset, the airport surveillance video and Autodesk 3ds Max are utilized to build two datasets. Experiment results show that the proposed method get better performance in terms of accuracy and efficiency compared with other related methods.