An advanced approach for navigation and image sensor integration for land vehicle navigation

In the last couple of decades, the demands of navigation technology have been increasing and the technology has been expanded in several application areas including automated car navigation and mobile mapping systems. However, there has been little research and study on the integration of GPS, IMU, and image sensors such as CCDs, and video cameras. This paper aims at aiding inertial navigation sensors with image sensor measurements and distance measurements even in an environment with no GPS assistance. Using an extended Kalman filtering technique, a novel integration scheme, a multi-modal approach, is presented in this paper for various sensors such as IMU, GPS, odometer, and CCD cameras to improve positioning accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed multimodal approach can be used to enhance positioning accuracy during GPS outages.