A7.1 - Extraction of Flight Parameters from MFD Video Signal Frames of the C-95 Aircraft
- Event
- ETTC 2026 - European Test and Telemetry Conference
2026-06-09 - 2026-06-11
Nuremberg - Chapter
- ML & AI II
- Author(s)
- D. F. D. Silva, N. P. O. Leite - Instituto de Pesquisas e Ensais em Voo (IPEV), São José dos Campos (Brazil), A. T. Santiago, M. R. O. A. Maximo, C. H. Q. Forster, L. G. Moro - Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA), São José dos Campos (Brazil)
- Pages
- 114 - 123
- DOI
- 10.5162/ettc2026/A7.1
- Price
- free
Abstract
The airborne Multifunction Display (MFD) is an essential real-time information system used by the flight crew to monitor the aircraft's operational condition, supporting informed decision-making and flight safety. Accordingly, this paper describes a computer vision algorithm for extracting flight parameters from C-95 aircraft MFD image frames acquired directly from the video output signal. Each frame is segmented into areas where parameters are displayed, then divided into sub-areas containing individual digits. The algorithm computes the quantity and spatial distribution of zero-pixel values in each sub-area to determine the most probable numerical value. Using a real flight MFD video recording, test results show that the algorithm extracts up to 35 flight parameters per frame in (4.18 ± 0.37) ms (1σ), corresponding to a worst-case throughput of approximately 220 fps. Reference values were synthesized using the MFD time display and the known video frame rate of 29.97 fps, thereby enabling ground-truth generation without manual annotation. Over 750,000 digit-level test cases yielded a minimum F₁-score of 0.9964. Although tailored to the C-95 MFD configuration, the proposed solution is computationally efficient and robust, making it a viable alternative for cost-effective Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) where dedicated high-precision instrumentation is unavailable. Key words: Flight Data Extraction, Digit Recognition, Computer Vision, Multifunction Display, Flight Test Instrumentation. 1. Introduction The continued airworthiness of an aircraft relies on the gathered information during the development and certification flight test campaigns [1]. Therefore, the integration of a complete Flight Test Instrumentation (FTI) system is essential for acquiring accurate and reliable test data that characterizes the test article's operational conditions...