Video-Assisted Global Positioning in Terrain Navigation with Known Landmarks. (2006)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Seetharaman Seetharaman, Guna Guna; Le Le, Ha V. Ha V.
• Is Part Of: International journal of distributed sensor networks. Volume 2:Number 2(2006)
• Page Start: 103
• Page End: 119
• Publication Date: 2006
• Subjects: Visual Navigation; GPS Fault Tolerance; Unmanned Air Vehicles; Low-altitude Aerial Imagery; Sensor networks -- Periodicals; Intelligent agents (Computer software) -- Periodicals; Multisensor data fusion -- Periodicals; 681.2
• DOI: 10.1080/15501320500201235
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1550-1329

Abstract

Abstract : We present a rigorous geometric analysis of the computation of the global positions of an airborne video camera and ground based objects using aerial images of known landmarks. This has also been known as the perspective-n-point (PnP) problem. A robust Hough transform-like method, facilitated by a class of CORDIC-structured computations is developed to find the camera position followed by a method of computing the position of a ground object from images of that object and three known landmarks. The results enable fast and effective visual terrain navigation of aerial surveillance systems when the global positioning and inertial navigation sensors become faulty, inaccurate, or dysfunctional. These new hardware implementable algorithms can also be used with MEMS based INS sensors through a multisensory fusion process.