Aircraft true heading estimation with low-cost GPS/INS and aerial images

This paper investigates the use of aerial images obtained from an airborne downward-looking camera to control error growth in the true heading from a low-cost integrated GPS/INS system. In the proposed approach, aerial images are processed to compute aircraft drift angle and integrated GPS/INS position information is used to compute aircraft track angle. Aircraft true heading is finally computed by subtracting drift angle from the track angle. The computed true heading is then fused with the integrated GPS/INS true heading through Kalman filter formulation to provide continuous, smooth and accurate true heading information. Simulation results are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.