Artificial Intelligence-Based Aircraft Detection for Enhanced Aviation Safety and Air Traffic Management
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.52436/1.jutif.2026.7.3.5661Keywords:
Aviation Safety, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Manned Aircraft DetectionAbstract
The rapid growth of international air traffic has made maintaining aviation safety and managing air traffic efficiently increasingly complex, particularly in identifying aircraft in constantly changing airspace. Traditional monitoring systems such as radar and Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) have limitations in operating at low altitudes, in adverse weather, and in overcrowded environments, which can reduce the ability to understand surrounding conditions. This research proposes an artificial intelligence-based visual detection system aimed at enhancing real-time aircraft identification and improving air traffic monitoring. The system uses a YOLO-based deep learning model enhanced with a special attention mechanism and data augmentation to increase accuracy, flexibility, and operational resilience. The dataset used covers various flight situations, such as variations in light, viewing angles, and background complexity, to train the model. The model's test results show that it can correctly identify 95.24% of passenger planes, 92.4% of blimps, and 90% of fighter planes. The average overall precision (mAP) is over 90%. This system is also capable of real-time inference with precision and recall consistently above 85% under various conditions. Compared with conventional vision-based detection methods, this system demonstrates superior localization capabilities and robustness, making it suitable for use in real-world flight surveillance and air traffic management. In conclusion, this AI-based framework provides a practical and scalable solution that can improve flight safety and promote smarter air traffic management.
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