Cross-Modal Images Matching Based Enhancement to MEMS INS for UAV Navigation in GNSS Denied Environments

A new cross-modal image matching method is proposed to solve the problem that unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are difficult to navigate in GPS-free environment and night environment. In this algorithm, infrared image or visible image is matched with satellite visible image. The matching process is divided into two steps, namely, coarse matching and fine alignment. Based on the dense structure features, the coarse matching algorithm can realize the position update above 10 Hz with a small amount of computation. Based on the end-to-end matching network, the fine alignment algorithm can align the multi-sensor image with the satellite image under the condition of interference. In order to obtain the position and heading information with higher accuracy, the fusion of the information after visual matching with the inertial information can restrain the divergence of the inertial navigation position error. The experiment shows that it has the advantages of strong anti-interference ability, strong reliability, and low requirements on hardware, which is expected to be applied in the field of unmanned navigation.