Nonlinear Estimation Approach to Real-Time Georegistration from Aerial Images

When taking aerial images, it is important to know locations of specific points of interest in an Earth-centered coordinate system (latitude, longitude, height). The correspondence between a pixel location in the image and its Earth coordinate is known as georegistration. There are two main technical challenges arising in the intended application. The first is that no known features are assumed to be available in any of the images. The second is that the intended applications are real time. Here, images are taken at regular intervals (i.e. once per second), and it is desired to make decisions in real time based on the geolocation of specific objects seen in the images as they arrive. This is in sharp contrast to most current methods for geolocation that operate "after-the-fact" by processing, on the ground, a database of stored images using computationally intensive methods. The solution is a nonlinear estimation algorithm that combines processed realtime camera images with vehicle position and attitude information ob tained from an onboard GPS receiver. This approach provides accurate georegistration estimates (latitude, longitude, height) of arbitrary features and/or points of interest seen in the camera images. This solves the georegistration problem at the modest cost of augmenting the camera information with a GPS receiver carried onboard the vehicle.