Image-based ranging has emerged as a critical issue in the low altitude operation of flight vehicles such as rotorcraft and planetary landers. These flight regimes require ranging systems for recovering the geometry of the terrain and obstacles for use with guidance algorithms. The development of a ranging equation combining image irradiance together with various order spatial partial derivatives and the vehicle motion parameters is discussed. The ranging equation is in the form of a polynomial in scene depth. Two-dimensional linear filters are then used to compute the coefficients of this polynomial to result in a fast image-based ranging algorithm. Performance of the algorithm is demonstrated using laboratory images.

Date Published: 1 July 1991
PDF: 11 pages
Proc. SPIE 1478, Sensors and Sensor Systems for Guidance and Navigation, (1 July 1991); doi: 10.1117/12.45635

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 1478:
Sensors and Sensor Systems for Guidance and Navigation
Jack F. Wade; Avi Tuchman, Editor(s)