Image sequence processing applied to autonomous aerial navigation

Template matching in real-time is a fundamental issue in many applications in computer vision such as tracking, stereo vision and autonomous navigation. The goal of this paper is to present a system for automatic image sequence processing for autonomous aerial navigation research. Two main experiments were employed in this work, the first with clipping images of a geo-referenced aerial image, to simulate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) navigation, and the second employing the video frames obtained from a camera fixed to a helicopter in a low level flight, simulating the vision system of an UAV. The image features used in recognition task were obtained by the SIFT algorithm. The recognition system consists on a video frame processing to estimate the UAV displacement. Promising results were obtained.