VALNet: Vision-Based Autonomous Landing with Airport Runway Instance Segmentation

Visual navigation, characterized by its autonomous capabilities, cost effectiveness, and robust resistance to interference, serves as the foundation for vision-based autonomous landing systems. These systems rely heavily on runway instance segmentation, which accurately divides runway areas and provides precise information for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation. However, current research primarily focuses on runway detection but lacks relevant runway instance segmentation datasets. To address this research gap, we created the Runway Landing Dataset (RLD), a benchmark dataset that focuses on runway instance segmentation mainly based on X-Plane. To overcome the challenges of large-scale changes and input image angle differences in runway instance segmentation tasks, we propose a vision-based autonomous landing segmentation network (VALNet) that uses band-pass filters, where a Context Enhancement Module (CEM) guides the model to learn adaptive “band” information through heatmaps, while an Orientation Adaptation Module (OAM) of a triple-channel architecture to fully utilize rotation information enhances the model’s ability to capture input image rotation transformations. Extensive experiments on RLD demonstrate that the new method has significantly improved performance. The visualization results further confirm the effectiveness and interpretability of VALNet in the face of large-scale changes and angle differences. This research not only advances the development of runway instance segmentation but also highlights the potential application value of VALNet in vision-based autonomous landing systems. Additionally, RLD is publicly available.