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Attention-Based Road Registration for GPS-Denied UAS Navigation
IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems
  • Teng Wang, Southeast University
  • Ye Zhao, Southeast University
  • Jiawei Wang, Tongji University
  • Arun K. Somani, Iowa State University
  • Changyin Sun, Southeast University
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Accepted Manuscript
Publication Date
9-1-2020
DOI
10.1109/TNNLS.2020.3015660
Abstract

Matching and registration between aerial images and prestored road landmarks are critical techniques to enhance unmanned aerial system (UAS) navigation in the global positioning system (GPS)-denied urban environments. Current registration processes typically consist of two separate stages of road extraction and road registration. These two-stage registration approaches are time-consuming and less robust to noise. To that end, in this article, we, for the first time, investigate the problem of end-to-end Aerial-Road registration. Using deep learning, we develop a novel attention-based neural network architecture for Aerial-Road registration. In this model, we construct two-branch neural networks with shared weights to map two input images into a common embedding space. Besides, considering that road features are sparsely distributed in images, we incorporate a novel multibranch attention module to filter out false descriptor matches from the indiscriminative background in order to improve registration accuracy. Finally, the results from extensive experiments show that compared with state-of-the-art approaches, the mean absolute errors of our approach in rotation angle and the translations in the x- and y-directions are reduced down by a factor of 1.24, 1.38, and 1.44, respectively. Furthermore, as a byproduct, our experimental results prove the feasibility of a neural network multitask learning approach to simultaneously achieve accurate Aerial-Road matching and registration, thus providing an efficient and accurate UAS geolocalization.

Comments

This is a manuscript of an article published as Wang, Teng, Ye Zhao, Jiawei Wang, Arun K. Somani, and Changyin Sun. "Attention-based road registration for GPS-denied UAS navigation." IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2020). DOI: 10.1109/TNNLS.2020.3015660. Posted with permission.

Rights
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Copyright Owner
IEEE
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Teng Wang, Ye Zhao, Jiawei Wang, Arun K. Somani, et al.. "Attention-Based Road Registration for GPS-Denied UAS Navigation" IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems (2020)
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/arun-somani/23/