Tightly Coupled GNSS/INS Integration via Factor Graph and Aided by Fish-Eye Camera

Abstract

GNSS/INS integrated solution has been extensively studied over the past decades. However, its performance relies heavily on environmental conditions and sensor costs. The GNSS positioning can obtain satisfactory performance in the open area. Unfortunately, its accuracy can be severely degraded in a highly urbanized area, due to the notorious multipath effects and none-line-of-sight (NLOS) receptions. As a result, excessive GNSS outliers occur, which causes a huge error in GNSS/INS integration. This paper proposes to apply a fish-eye camera to capture the sky view image to further classify the NLOS and line-of-sight (LOS) measurements. In addition, the raw INS and GNSS measurements are tightly integrated using a state-of-the-art probabilistic factor graph model. Instead of excluding the NLOS receptions, this paper makes use of both the NLOS and LOS measurements by treating them with different weightings. Experiments conducted in typical urban canyons of Hong Kong showed that the proposed method could effectively mitigate the effects of GNSS outliers, and an improved accuracy of GNSS/INS integration was obtained, when compared with the conventional GNSS/INS integration.