Abstract A method to fast detect airport runway in the aerial images is presented in this paper. Firstly, the binary image is generated via adaptive edge detection, so the main edges of the object in the image are extracted. Next, using the length information of the lines and gradient information of the pixels, the postprocessing is applied to eliminate the short lines and reduce the curves. Then the parallel straight lines detected by Hough transform are considered as candidate regions. At last, the candidate regions are verified by the character of runway. Experiments on dozens of the aerial images from Internet indicate that this method can detect the runway exactly and quickly, and it is robust to the disturbance of some background objects such as cloud.
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2006, Vol. 19 
