This research focuses on the development of a persistent navigation algorithm for a hovering vehicle with a single, downward-facing visible spectrum camera. A successful persistent navigation algorithm allows a vehicle to:
* Continuously estimate its location and pose within a local, if not global, coordinate frame.
* Continuously align incoming data to both temporally proximal and temporally distant data. For aerial images, this alignment is equivalent to image mosaicking, as is commonly used in aerial photogrammetry to produce broad-scale photomaps from a sequence of discrete images.
* Operate relative to, and be commanded relative to the sensor data, rather than relative to an abstract coordinate system.
The core application space considered here is moderate-to-high altitude aerial mapping, and a number of sets of high-resolution, high-overlap aerial photographs are used as the core test data set. These images are captured from a sufficient altitude that the apparent perspective shift of objects on the ground is minimized -- the scene is effectively planar. As such, this research focuses heavily on the properties and advantages available when processing such planar images.
This research is split into two threads which track the two main challenges in visual persistent navigation: the association and alignment of visual data given significant image change, and the development of an estimation algorithm and data storage structure with bounded computational and storage costs for a fixed map size.
Persistent navigation requires the robot to accurately align incoming images against historical data. By its nature, however,
visual data contains a high degree of variability despite minimal changes in the scene itself. As a simple example, as the sun moves and weather conditions change, the apparent illumination and shading of objects in the scene can vary significantly. More critically, image alignment must be robust to change in the scene itself, as that change is often a critical output from the robot's re-exploration.
This problem is considered in two contexts. First, a set of state-of-the-art feature detection algorithms are evaluated against sample data sets which include both temporally proximal and disparate images of the same location. The capacity of each algorithm to identify repeated point features is measured for a spectrum of algorithm-specific parameter values.
Next, the potential of using a prior estimate on the inter-image geometry to improve the robustness of precise image alignment is considered for two phases of the image alignment process: feature matching and robust outlier rejection. A number of geometry-aware algorithms are proposed for both phases, and tested against similar sets of similar and disparate aerial images. While many of the proposed algorithms do improve on the performance of the unguided algorithms, none are vastly superior.
The second thread starts by considering the problem of navigation fromdownward-looking aerial images from the perspective of Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). This leads to the development of
Simultaneous Mosaicking and Resectioning Through Planar Image Graphs (SMARTPIG), an online, iterative mosaicking and SLAM algorithm built on the assumption of a planar scene. A number of samples of SMARTPIG outputs are shown, including mosaics of a 600-meter square airport with approximately 3-meter reprojection errors relative to ground control points.
SMARTPIG, like most SLAM algorithms, does not fulfill the criteria for persistent navigation because the computational and storage costs are proportional to the total mission length, not the total area explored. SMARTPIG is evolved towards persistent navigation by the introduction of the featurescape, a storage structure for long-term point-feature data, to produce Planar Image Graphs for PErsistent Navigation (PIGPEN). PIGPEN is demonstrated perfoming robot re-localization onto an existing SMARTPIG mosaic with an accuracy comparable to the original mosaic.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/10421 |
| Date | January 2015 |
| Creators | Marburg, Aaron Ming |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Aaron Ming Marburg, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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