Abstract
Local features extraction is a crucial technology for image matching navigation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), where it aims to accurately and robustly match a real-time image and a geo-referenced image to obtain the position update information of the UAV. However, it is a challenging task due to the inconsistent image capture conditions, which will lead to extreme appearance changes, especially the different imaging principle between an infrared image and RGB image. In addition, the sparsity and labeling complexity of existing public datasets hinder the development of learning-based methods in this research area. This paper proposes a novel learning local features extraction method, which uses local features extracted by deep neural network to find the correspondence features on the satellite RGB reference image and real-time infrared image. First, we propose a single convolution neural network that simultaneously extracts dense local features and their corresponding descriptors. This network combines the advantages of a high repeatability local feature detector and high reliability local feature descriptors to match the reference image and real-time image with extreme appearance changes. Second, to make full use of the sparse dataset, an iterative training scheme is proposed to automatically generate the high-quality corresponding features for algorithm training. During the scheme, the dense correspondences are automatically extracted, and the geometric constraints are added to continuously improve the quality of them. With these improvements, the proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance for infrared aerial (UAV captured) image and satellite reference image, which shows 4–6% performance improvements in precision, recall, and F1-score, compared to the other methods. Moreover, the applied experiment results show its potential and effectiveness on localization for UAVs navigation and trajectory reconstruction application.
Highlights
As a normal method of navigation and positioning, the GPS/INS integrated navigation system has been widely used for precise localization of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
Experiments using the dataset serve to demonstrate that our method can obtain the state-of-the-art performance for the infrared aerial (UAV captured) image and satellite reference image matching task
This paper has proposed a novel approach for infrared aerial image and satellite reference image matching through local feature extraction
Summary
As a normal method of navigation and positioning, the GPS/INS integrated navigation system has been widely used for precise localization of UAVs. A new low-cost navigation and positioning technique which can be robustly applied in a GPS denied environment must be considered. The process of seeking the same scene in different images through the consistency of image features, structure, and content is usually known as image matching. It has been one of the crucial techniques in various applied fields, including vision-based navigation of UAVs [2], geometric alignment [3], precise localization [4], and automatic landing and takeoff [5].
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