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Characterization of mountain drainage patterns for GPS-denied UAS navigation augmentation

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Abstract

We present a novel approach to use mountain drainage patterns for GPS-denied navigation of small unmanned aerial systems, such as the ScanEagle, utilizing a down-looking fixed focus monocular imager. Our proposal allows for extension of GPS-denied missions in mountain areas, with no assumption of human-made geographic objects. We leverage the analogy between mountain drainage patterns, human aeteriograms, and human fingerprints, to match local drainage patterns to parallax occlusion maps of geo-registered radar returns (GRRR). The GRRR data may be loaded on-board the aircraft pre-mission to avoid the need for a scanning aperture radar during the mission. For recognition purpose, we represent a given mountain area with a set of spatially distributed mountain minutiae, i.e., details found in the drainage patterns, so that conventional minutiae-based fingerprint matching approaches can be used to match real-time camera images against template images in the training set. We use medical arteriography processing technique to extract the patterns. The minutiae-based representation of mountains is achieved by first exposing mountain ridges and valleys with a series of filters and then extracting mountain minutiae from these ridges/valleys. Our results are experimentally validated on actual terrain data and show the effectiveness of minutiae-based mountain representation method.

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Acknowledgments

The research reported in this paper was in part funded by Rockwell Collins Advanced Technology Center, and Jerry R. Junkins Chair Endowment at Iowa State University (ISU). The authors would like to acknowledge the invaluable support and feedback from Dependable Computing and Networking Laboratory members at ISU.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, 50010, USA

    Teng Wang, Koray Celik & Arun K. Somani

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  1. Teng Wang
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  2. Koray Celik
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  3. Arun K. Somani
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Correspondence to Teng Wang.

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Wang, T., Celik, K. & Somani, A.K. Characterization of mountain drainage patterns for GPS-denied UAS navigation augmentation. Machine Vision and Applications 27, 87–101 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-015-0723-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00138-015-0723-9

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