Improving Real-World Performance of Vision Aided Navigation in a Flight Environment

The motivation of this research is to fuse information from an airborne imaging sensor with information extracted from satellite imagery in order to provide accurate position when GPS is unavailable for an extended duration. A corpus of existing geo-referenced satellite imagery is used to create a key point database. A novel algorithm for recovering coarse pose using by comparing key points extracted from the airborne imagery to the reference database is developed. This coarse position is used to bootstrap a local-area geo-registration algorithm, which provides GPS-level position estimates. This research derives optimizations for existing local-area methods for operation in flight environments