Airports runway defects detection

In cooperation with

Small defects, big problems

Regular check of runway and surrounding area for cracks and other defects is an important part in airport life. Such problems should be identified at the first stage of their occurrence, as deeper destruction may lead to accidents, which is unacceptable in continuous passenger traffic.

At first glance it may seem that the task of finding defects on the runway is identical to the problem of finding defects on roads of Russia. The resemblance is definitely there: in the end, in both cases, the work is reduced to finding problems in the road surface. However, the airport task is complicated by several factors:

The table above shows that the size of defects we are interested in is much smaller than on regular roads. This creates additional problems not only in the work of preparing of the training sample, but also increases computational complexity.

Model

To find really small defects we have developed a special configuration of a neural network with a high accuracy. Of course, increasing the machining accuracy increases execution time of the program and amount of noise. There are two tasks: to increase processing speed and remove extraneous noise from the results.

Pic 2. Runway surface before and after.

Pic 3. Runway surface before and after.

Pic 4. Close look

We was able to reduce execution time by several orders of magnitude due to the use of GPU NVidea through the use of technology CUDA, allowing us to transfer the calculation from CPU to GPU. This method allows us to parallelize calculations on thousands of concurrent threads.

		Cores	Performance
	CPU	1-8
	GPU (CUDA)	3000