Efficient Bias Estimation in Airborne Video Georegistration for Ground Target Tracking

Abstract

Accurate georegistration is required in airborne surveillance of ground targets since even a small bias in sensor registration may result in a large error in the converted target geolocation. Thus, this article addresses the problem of estimating and correcting the sensor biases in target geolocation. The effect of sensor biases on target geolocation is modeled and decoupled from the true target geolocation. By assuming that the biases are small, the effect of biases is separately addressed by a linear term in the converted target geolocation. Based on this model, two computationally efficient methods are proposed to estimate the biases. The converted target geolocation can then be corrected based on the bias estimates. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods in estimating sensor biases and correcting target geolocations as well as their high computational efficiency.