Automated Visual Location Fix for Submarine Navigation

Submarine navigation teams typically use navigation aids (Navaids), such as lighthouses, smokestacks, and more conventional navigation buoys, to precisely maneuver about potential water hazards and within confined waterways. The Navy seeks to use submarine periscope image data to automatically acquire and maintain visual fixes on various Navaids, in order to reduce operator workload and enhance the team decision making for navigation. Altron proposes to expand on previous image-based object tracking and image recognition work to develop a system which can automatically find and accurately localize various types of Navaids, and maintain position estimates of each Navaid when not in the imaging system field of view. As Navaids are tracked, image data will be automatically extracted and used to update a cloud-based database of Navaid templates and corresponding locations, to improve future recognition to be shared by the fleet.