Development of a method for image-based motion estimation of a VTOL-MAV on FPGA

In this paper, the development of the vision based motion estimation for a small-scale VTOL-MAV as well as the implementation on FPGA are investigated. Especially in urban environments the GPS signal quality is disturbed by shading and multipath propagation and an augmentation with another sensor is inevitable. The vision system bases on the analysis of the sparse optical flow that is extracted from images taken by the onboard camera. From the extracted point correspondences projective transformations are estimated with a robust parameter estimation algorithm. As the underlying image processing routines are computationally expensive but can be processed in parallel they have been implemented on FPGA. The different parts of the algorithm as well as the implementation are covered in detail.