Airplane extraction and identification by improved PCNN with wavelet transform and modified Zernike moments

At an airport, the information of the number and positions of airplanes is very important for the applications of air navigation. Especially, the information from airplane extraction and identification is significant in both civil and military remote sensing. In this paper, according to the characteristics of airplanes and airport in satellite remote sensing images, a new airplane image segmentation algorithm is proposed based on improved pulse-coupled neural network (PCNN) with wavelet transform, and airplane identification algorithm is carried out by using modified Zernike moments. Firstly, for an original image, a PCNN model is improved and then used to do image segmentation by combining the wavelet transform. Then, in order to reduce the number of irrespective targets in the image and increase the processing speed, the airplanes in the original image are roughly detected on the characteristics of the segmented object contour geometries. Finally, the Zernike moments are modified and then applied to identify the roughly detected airplanes accurately. By comparing to the five traditional image segmentation algorithms for the same airplane images, the testing results show that the improved PCNN image segmentation algorithm can segment and detect airplane regions at an airport accurately at a high recognising rate and with high recognising stability, and it is not affected by the image shadows and rotations.