Symmetry-Constrained Multi-Camera Tracking for Aircraft Preflight Inspection via Spatio-Temporal Graph Optimization

Automated verification of preflight aircraft inspection—a critical safety procedure—is addressed by integrating multi-camera tracking with procedural knowledge through a symmetry-aware spatio-temporal graph model. Departing from conventional tracking paradigms, the framework encodes operational protocols and structural symmetries of the aircraft as explicit constraints for trajectory association. Semantically consistent inspection zones are derived from geometric symmetry, and reliable tracklets extracted within them are connected using rules that enforce temporal order and identity consistency. Verification is formulated as a constrained shortest-path search over this graph, ensuring sequential and complete coverage of all mandatory zones by a single inspector. Evaluated on real-world airport surveillance data across diverse conditions, the proposed approach achieves a Complete Inspection Success Rate of 86.5%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art tracking and re-identification baselines. The results demonstrate that explicit procedural integration substantially enhances the reliability and interpretability of automated compliance verification in safety-critical industrial monitoring.