Title
Real-time Geo-localization Using Satellite Imagery and Topography for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
Abstract
The capabilities of autonomous flight with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have significantly increased in recent times. However, basic problems such as fast and robust geo-localization in GPS-denied environments still remain unsolved. Existing research has primarily concentrated on improving the accuracy of localization at the cost of long and varying computation time in various situations, which often necessitates the use of powerful ground station machines. In order to make image-based geo-localization online and pragmatic for lightweight embedded systems on UAVs, we propose a framework that is reliable in changing scenes, flexible about computing resource allocation and adaptable to common camera placements. The framework is comprised of two stages: offline database preparation and online inference. At the first stage, color images and depth maps are rendered as seen from potential vehicle poses quantized over the satellite and topography maps of anticipated flying areas. A database is then populated with the global and local descriptors of the rendered images. At the second stage, for each captured real-world query image, top global matches are retrieved from the database and the vehicle pose is further refined via local descriptor matching. We present field experiments of image-based localization on two different UAV platforms to validate our results.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1109/IROS51168.2021.9636705
2021 IEEE/RSJ INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTELLIGENT ROBOTS AND SYSTEMS (IROS)
DocType
ISSN
Citations 
Conference
2153-0858
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Shuxiao Chen101.01
Xiangyu Wu286.00
Mark W. Müller3528.72
Koushil Sreenath435833.41