VLSI architecture for video-assisted global positioning

Abstract

We design and implement an efficient architecture for geometric computation of the global position of an airborne video camera from images of known landmarks. A solution based on this analysis, a robust Hough transform-like method facilitated by a class of CORDIC-structured computations is implemented within the framework of terrain navigation. It empowers aerial surveillance systems to navigate effectively when the global position and inertial navigation sensors are out of order. This is particularly useful when the GPS functionality is disrupted by jamming and other techniques. Our architecture exploits parallelism among independent operations and uses pipelining of critical components for superior performance. Double precision division being computationally expensive is performed minimally. Correlation between data is tapped to reduce complexity of flash ADCs, at the cost of few clock cycles once to initialize Hough voting