Optical Flow Based Velocity Estimation for Vision based Navigation of Aircraft

摘要

Objective: This paper deals with vision based velocity estimation for aircraft navigation system using optical flow method. Method: A downward facing monocular camera is used to capture image sequence of terrain data and its velocities are estimated using optical flow algorithm. Findings: The velocity estimation using optical flow algorithm are performed on two types of images such as terrain and ocean. Velocities estimated are validated with camera motion data acquired by simple displacement computation. Application: The velocity estimated helps in vision based navigation of aircraft. It also has various applications in the field of robotics.