An integrated multisensor aircraft track recovery system for remote sensing

This paper describes an application of the Kalman filter in a track recovery system (TRS) for postflight processing of aircraft navigation sensor data. The track recovery system has been successfully used as a key component of the Canadian aerial hydrography pilot project for mapping of shallow coastal waters. Recorded data from an inertial navigation system (INS) is combined with data obtained from a number of auxiliary sensors to construct a set of error measurements. The measurements are prefiltered to compress the data and are then processed using a factorized Kalman filter and a modified Bryson-Frazier smoother to produce estimates of the time-correlated sensor errors. The flight profile is obtained by subtracting the computed error estimates from the recorded INS data. The residual errors observed in processing real data collected in a number of field tests are less than 1 m in position and less than 0.03 degrees in attitude.