Terrain matching based on imaging laser radar

A terrain aided navigation using a range image from imaging laser radar is presented. A real-time terrain elevation map is generated from the range image. Because of undulating terrain, the recovered terrain elevation map is non-uniform. It needs to be resampled. Ridge lines are extracted as basic 3D terrain features. The Hausdorff distance between planar sets of points is known to be a good method to compare binary images. We present an algorithm to match terrain using the modified Hausdorff distance as the measure of the difference between two images. The experimental results show that the proposed method is effective for terrain matching.