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• ESTIMATION OF THE SPATIAL POSITION OF AN ON-BOARD CAMERA BY COMPARING AERIAL IMAGES AND SATELLITE IMAGE DATA

  А.Y. Budko , Т.А. Gaida , Z.А. Ponimash

  2026-02-27

  Abstract ▼

  The article describes a method for estimating the spatial position of an onboard camera of an aircraft. This method involves comparing aerial photographs and georeferenced remote sensing (RSS) data by using a neural network detector to detect stable spatiotemporal reference points in both datasets. This method then solves the well-known Perspective-n-Point (PnP) problem for estimating rotation and translation matrices that minimize the reprojection error based on the correspondences between 3D world points and 2D points of their projections onto the onboard camera matrix. This approach can be used to solve the pressing problem of aircraft localization in the absence of global navigation satellite system signals. Road intersections are selected as stable spatiotemporal reference points that are clearly visible in RSS data and aerial photographs. Other local semantic image patterns characteristic of a particular area may serve as an alternative. Since direct comparison of remote sensing and airborne images is difficult due to significant differences in shooting conditions, the use of robust landmark detectors based on artificial neural network (ANN) algorithms is proposed. To train the robust detector, a mixed dataset was created using satellite and airborne imagery. The mixed dataset was labeled using a 3D Gaussian function normalized to unity with a apex at the intersection center, the graph of which is projected onto a 2D mask of the training set. The parameters of the Gaussian function are calculated based on the radius of the circle enclosing the intersection. Using a normalized 3D Gaussian function with a apex at the geometric center of the intersection projection allows the network to predict the probability of each image pixel belonging to the intersection, with a maximum at the intersection center, which increases positioning accuracy due to more precise georeferencing of the landmark point in the global 3D dataset. A U-Net-type artificial neural network was trained as an intersection detector. A differentiable analog of the Dice metric was used as a training quality metric. AdamW, coupled with a CosineAnnealingLR cosine learning rate planner, was used as an optimizer. The final section of the paper presents the results of comparing satellite data and airborne imagery using the proposed method.