Almeida, João Miguel Brito de2026-05-052026-05-052022Almeida, J. M. B. (2022). Application of artificial intelligence to the detection of foreign object debris at aerodromes’ movement area. Unpublished manuscript.http://hdl.handle.net/10400.26/62991Resumo alargado da dissertação de mestrado com o mesmo título, defendida em 2002.The goal of the present dissertation is to develop a preliminary low-cost and passive system that detects Foreign Object Debris (FODs) at aerodromes based on computer vision with neural networks. FODs are a twofold problem, involving safety risks and high associated costs. Although some systems already exist to detect FODs, these are based on radars, making them expensive. We build a dataset of images to test the viability of this solution, which was already attempted by other authors but the datasets are not publicly available. Moreover, we build a simplified architecture of the system to capture the images. In parallel, we develop a software pipeline which starts with image capturing scripts and ends in the evaluation of the models of neural networks we selected. The datasets created result from three different electro-optical sensors: visible, near infrared and long-wave infrared. From the first, resulted a dataset of 9,260 images, from the second 5,672 and from the third 10,388. Our approach to this problem is based on supervised learning with image classification and object detection and we train the models in subsets of the datasets. For image classification, we choose Xception as the neural network, achieving an 98.86% accuracy. In the case of object detection, we opt for a single-stage detector – YOLOv3 –, achieving an AP of 91.08%. Finally, we test the same models on new examples and verify a decrease in their performance to 77.92% accuracy for the classifier and 37.49% AP for the detector.engForeign object debrisComputer visionDatasetImage classificationObject detectionDetritos de objetos estranhosVisão por computadorConjunto de dadoClassificação de imagensDeteção de objetosAeródromosSensores eletro-óticosInteligência artificialSegurança da aviaçãoworking paper