Improving visual terrain relative navigation for aerial systems at diverse altitudes

Matthew Castleberry; Scott Martin

doi:10.1117/12.2587350

12 April 2021 Improving visual terrain relative navigation for aerial systems at diverse altitudes

Matthew Castleberry, Scott Martin

Proceedings Volume 11748, Autonomous Systems: Sensors, Processing, and Security for Vehicles and Infrastructure 2021; 1174802 (2021) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2587350
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2021, Online Only

Abstract

One popular means of aerial localization and navigation in GPS-denied environments is visual terrain relative navigation or also called geo-registration. Terrain relative navigation involves performing image registration with sensed aerial camera imagery and georeferenced satellite maps to produce the geographic translation and rotation of the camera. One popular terrain relative navigation technique depends on matching feature descriptors. These features, however, are intolerant to major changes in perspective, light, vegetation, season, and other scene changes. In these cases, they produce excessive amounts of false matches. Alternatively, image correlation can be used for registering a sensed image to a reference image but is extremely intolerant to perspective differences for 6 degree of freedom (6DOF) camera systems. This research explores the use of a combination of corners detection and normalized cross correlation for aerial vehicles at different altitudes. New methods for using dynamic search windows within reference satellite imagery is explored to constrain the pose estimation and increase image matching accuracy. The algorithms are tested with both simulated aerial imagery and experimentally sensed imagery captured with rigid mounted cameras. The algorithm is evaluated on its successful match rate and pose estimation error compared to truth.

Conference Presentation

Citation Download Citation

Matthew Castleberry and Scott Martin "Improving visual terrain relative navigation for aerial systems at diverse altitudes", Proc. SPIE 11748, Autonomous Systems: Sensors, Processing, and Security for Vehicles and Infrastructure 2021, 1174802 (12 April 2021); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2587350

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