Browsing by Subject "aerial navigation"

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Access status: Open Access ,
Aerial SLAM algorithm with global alignment using satellite imagery
(Wydawnictwa AGH, 2023) Karbowski, Jakub; Bartoszewski, Bartosz; Kokot, Daria; Kwiecień, Michał Jan; Turlej, Tymoteusz
Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms can be used in aerial vehicles with a down-facing camera for navigation and terrain mapping. However, they suffer from an incremental position error. Each neighbouring image pair match introduces an alignment error which accumulates to a global position error proportional to the map size. By using a reference satellite image map this error can be reduced to a constant factor. This work proposes a novel image alignment algorithm called Embed Match which can be applied to any SLAM algorithm. Embed Match uses a neural network to represent a map region as a field of embedding vectors which are a semantic representation of the area. By comparing the embedding fields of a satellite image and the camera image, an alignment function is defined. Maximising this function leads to image alignment. The proposed algorithm shows a radically different approach from keypoint-based alignment methods which usually struggle with matching drastically different images, such as satellite and real camera images.