A Fast and Robust Scene Matching Method for Navigation

The selection of matching method is critical to the scene matching navigation system, as it determines the accuracy of navigation. A coarse-to-fine matching method, which combines the area-based and feature-based matching method, is presented to meet the requirements of navigation, including the real-time performance, the sub-pixel accuracy and the robustness. In the coarse matching stage, the real-time performance is achieved by a pyramid multi-resolution technique, and the robustness is improved by multi-scale circular template fusion. In the precise matching stage, an improved SIFT method is introduced to calculate the matching position and the rotation angle. To validate the method, some experiments are completed. The results show that the proposed method can achieve the sub-pixel matching accuracy and improve the angle accuracy to 0.1◦.