Campus Units
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Document Type
Conference Proceeding
Conference
SPIE Defense + Security
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
6-9-2014
Journal or Book Title
Proceedings of SPIE: Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications XI
Volume
9076
First Page
907604
DOI
10.1117/12.2050732
Conference Title
SPIE Defense + Security
Conference Date
May 5-9, 2014
City
Baltimore, MD
Abstract
We present a novel approach to use mountain drainage patterns for GPS-Denied navigation of small unmanned aerial systems (UAS) such as the ScanEagle, utilizing a down-looking fixed focus monocular imager. Our proposal allows extension of missions to GPS-denied mountain areas, with no assumption of human-made geographic objects. We leverage the analogy between mountain drainage patterns, human arteriograms, and human fingerprints, to match local drainage patterns to Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) rendered parallax occlusion maps of geo-registered radar returns (GRRR). Details of our actual GPU algorithm is beyond the subject of this paper, and is planned as a future paper. The matching occurs in real-time, while GRRR data is loaded on-board the aircraft pre-mission, so as not to require a scanning aperture radar during the mission. For recognition purposes, we represent a given mountain area with a set of spatially distributed mountain minutiae, i.e., details found in the drainage patterns, so that conventional minutiae-based fingerprint matching approaches can be used to match real-time camera image against template images in the training set. We use medical arteriography processing techniques to extract the patterns. The minutiae-based representation of mountains is achieved by first exposing mountain ridges and valleys with a series of filters and then extracting mountain minutiae from these ridges/valleys. Our results are experimentally validated on actual terrain data and show the effectiveness of minutiae-based mountain representation method. Furthermore, we study how to select landmarks for UAS navigation based on the proposed mountain representation and give a set of examples to show its feasibility. This research was in part funded by Rockwell Collins Inc.
Copyright Owner
SPIE
Copyright Date
2014
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Recommended Citation
Wang, Teng; Çelik, Koray; and Somani, Arun K., "Meta-image navigation augmenters for GPS denied mountain navigation of small UAS" (2014). Electrical and Computer Engineering Conference Papers, Posters and Presentations. 119.
https://lib.dr.iastate.edu/ece_conf/119
Included in
Electronic Devices and Semiconductor Manufacturing Commons, Navigation, Guidance, Control and Dynamics Commons
Comments
This proceeding is published as Wang, Teng, Koray Çelik, and Arun K. Somani. "Meta-image navigation augmenters for GPS denied mountain navigation of small UAS." In Proceedings of SPIE 9076, Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications XI. (2014): 907604. DOI: 10.1117/12.2050732. Posted with permission.