Can Vision Models Read the Radar Display? On the Feasibility of Radar Imagery for Air Traffic Complexity Estimation
This study investigates whether radar imagery can serve as an effective input modality for deep vision models to estimate air traffic complexity. The traffic situation is encoded into a five-channel image incorporating positional, heading, speed, and altitude information. For the first time, a Vision Transformer is employed to perform regression on four intrinsic complexity components derived from geometric relationships among aircraft. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves R² values exceeding 0.96 across all complexity components. Perturbation analysis further reveals the model’s sensitivity to key aircraft, with its responses closely aligning with those aircraft’s actual contributions to overall complexity, thereby validating the efficacy of sparse, self-similar radar images for modeling air traffic complexity.