Item – Theses Canada

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OCLC number
914079647
Link(s) to full text
LAC copy
LAC copy
Author
Conrad, Eugene Clayton James,1970-
Title
Automatic detection of crashed aircraft using synthetic aperture radar.
Degree
M.A. Sc. -- Royal Military College of Canada, 2012
Publisher
Ottawa : Library and Archives Canada = Bibliothèque et Archives Canada, [2013]
©2012
Description
2 microfiches
Notes
Includes bibliographical references.
Abstract
<?Pub Inc> The system used by the Canadian Department of National Defence to perform aeronautical search and rescue has associated with it some deficiencies which may lead to a prolonged search for small crashed aircraft. Although there has been much research into using synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to find crashed aircraft, this thesis is one of the first to use the higher resolution commercial images available from the RADARSAT 2 satellite. Also, in previous research there was no standard image nor set of images on which different techniques were applied and compared. Often the size of the image, size of the aircraft, or pixel intensity of the aircraft in the SAR image was not stated, making it difficult to compare any of the previous techniques. In this thesis, a normalized average aircraft exemplar is developed using SAR images of aircraft and the exemplar is correlated to SAR images containing actual aircraft using a 2-dimensional cross-correlation detection technique. In addition to the correlator detector, a double window filter (DWF) detector and a Teager-Kaiser filter are used separately to pre-filter the images. The detection techniques were all applied to a set of images with varying degrees of aircraft image intensity so that they can be compared on an equal basis. An image of an airport was also used to establish rates of detection, missed detection and false alarm. Finally, the techniques were applied to different images of a simulated crashed aircraft. It was found that neither the DWF nor the TK pre-filtering technique improved the performance of the correlator detector. Finally, recommendations are made to further study the use of SAR images from both spaceborne and airborne platforms for search and rescue.
ISBN
9780494933503
049493350X