Model Based Vision for Aircraft Position Determination

This paper investigates the use of imaging sensors to estimate the position of an aircraft with respect to the runway during landing. Passive vision techniques to estimate aircraft position during landing rely on the known runway model, images acquired by onboard imaging sensor, orientation information provided by the inertial navigation system and the position estimate provided by devices such as the global positioning system. Point features in the runway model are compared with the onboard sensor images of the features and the difference between the two is used to correct the aircraft position and orientation. In this paper the sensitivity of point features is examined as a means of determining the accuracy of such position estimation techniques. Expressions are derived for the sensitivity of image point to errors in the position and orientation of the sensor. Using these, the sensitivity of the image to aircraft position and orientation errors along a typical landing glide path is studied. A least squares technique based on this sensitivity analysis is described for the correction of position and orientation estimates. The final version of the paper will include results from the application of this analysis to real image sequences collected in flight.