UAV Visual Localization Technology Based on Heterogenous Remote Sensing Image Matching

Abstract

At present, the positioning function of intelligent UAVs mainly uses GPS technology, and GPS signals are susceptible to environmental and electromagnetic interference factors. In this paper, we combine remote sensing image processing with image matching algorithms to propose a GPS-independent visual localization technique for UAVs. First, the VGG16 network is used as the feature extraction backbone network, and the backbone network is designed and optimized for the characteristics of heterogenous remote sensing images. Secondly, a feature point screening and matching strategy is constructed, by which common feature points between heterogeneous remote sensing images can be screened and used for feature matching. Finally, the remote sensing image containing geographic location information and the UAV aerial image are fed into the network for feature extraction and matching, and the transformation matrix between the aligned images is calculated by the successfully matched feature points, and the transformation matrix is used to complete the mapping from the aerial image to the satellite image, and finally the geographic location information of each pixel can be read from the mapped image to complete the localization.