Future Airportal Surveillance and Prediction

Recent advances in airport surface surveillance and other sensor, automation, and data sharing technologies now allow the consideration of a significant change in the control paradigm for aircraft and vehicles on the airport surface. Through the use of airport surface surveillance displays, and other computer information systems, it is conceptually possible to provide ATC services without the ATC tower. This Virtual Tower concept has been identified as a primary component of the Joint Planning and Development Office operational concept for the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). Remote video surveillance of the airfield is likely to play a key role in any such Virtual Tower implementation. However, significant research on computer vision and video surveillance capabilities to support the Virtual Tower concept must first be addressed. These video surveillance capabilities will also provide information to support flight and airport status monitoring. Mosaic ATM proposes to research and develop image processing algorithms to integrate video and airport surface surveillance data to enable NASA researchers to conduct detailed evaluation of fundamental issues associated with the Virtual Tower concept.