Radar Image-Based Navigation

Denial of Global Navigation Satellite Systems for aircraft navigation in a Degraded Visual Environment (DVE) has a significant impact on military missions. To address this, TSC proposes to develop an image-based navigation system that exploits an onboard, forward-looking millimeter wave (W-band) radar. In Phase I, TSC will investigate two different image-based navigation concepts: One will correlate W-band radar images collected in real-time with previous radar scans to correct the drift in the INS solution. The second concept will correlate the W-band images with non-like source, geo-referenced imagery collected using other radar or EO/IR sensors or digital databases. The Phase I focus will be developing and testing innovative algorithms to automatically establish tie-points between the real-time W-band radar images and reference imagery, and solving for the aircraft position/attitude. The planned work includes extending a previously developed multi-sensor, rotational- and scale-invariant image registration technique that worked well. TSC will simulate realistic W-band data to evaluate the feature matching and navigation accuracy that can be obtained. In the Option effort, TSC will refine the most promising algorithms and evaluate them over a wider range of conditions. In Phase II, TSC will implement near-real-time processing software and demonstrate the algorithms on measured W-band data.