Image matching applied to autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

This paper brings results of an image matching approach applied to the estimation of position for autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles UAVs. The main idea is to replace the global positioning system GPS signal by matching the onboard video to a georeferenced satellite image. Image processing techniques and edge descriptors are considered in order to achieve robustness to different sensors and luminosity conditions. The UAV position is then calculated by finding the pixel in the georeferenced image providing a higher spatial correlation to the image captured at flight time. The evaluation of our vision system takes into account different kinds of terrains, such as in forests, roads and urban areas and its capacity to follow real routes specified in a flight simulator. The results obtained are promising and indicate that our methodology can be used in substitution for GPS on real flights.