Mosaic aided navigation: Tools, methods and results

The on-line construction of an image mosaic or panorama can be exploited to aid the navigation system of an airborne platform. The purpose of the paper is threefold. First, the paper presents some of the tools required for computing a mosaic and using the information collected as a side product within a navigation filter. These tools include a special variation of the Kalman filter and a new formulation of the tri-focal tensor from multi-frame vision. Second, the paper summarizes a general method for fusing the motion information obtained during the mosaicking process and also shows how “loop-closure” can be used to preserve navigation errors at their initial levels. Third, the paper discusses a number of illustrative examples to show how mosaic aiding can indeed result in a substantial improvement of the navigation solution.