GPS/VISNAV integrated relative navigation and attitude determination system for ultra-close spacecraft formation flying

For the improvement of accuracy and better fault-tolerant performance, a global position system （GPS）/vision navigation （VISNAV） integrated relative navigation and attitude determination approach is presented for ultra-close spacecraft formation flying. Onboard GPS and VISNAV system are adopted and a federal Kalman filter architecture is used for the total navigation system design. Simulation results indicate that the integrated system can provide a total improvement of relative navigation and attitude estimation performance in accuracy and fault-tolerance.

A New GPS Deformation Monitoring Algorithm Applied to Donghai Bridge

A real-time,long-round global positioning system (GPS) bridge-deformation monitoring technology was proposed,which processes the carrier phase of multiple GPS receivers in an operation center.It was demon- strated an extended Kalman filter with triple differential ionospheric-free measurement (EKF-TIF) which can eliminate the ionospheric delay,whiten the TIF noise and optimize the results of EKF,consequently,achieves a better performance than existing real time kinematic (RTK) solution.An experiment,which takes an active ionosphere condition into consideration,proves the feasibility of this system by comparing its records to that of a traditional RTK solution,practically,the system installed on the Donghai Bridge has survived a non-break running for five months.The analysis to the monitoring records shows the system achieves the designed accu- racy and reliability.

An approach for shape optimization of stratosphere airships based on multidisciplinary design optimization

Airship shape is crucial to the design of stratosphere airships. In this paper, multidisciplinary design optimization (MDO) technology is introduced into the design of airship shape. We devise a composite objective function, based on this technology, which takes account of various factors which influence airship performance, including aerodynamics, structures, energy and weight to determine the optimal airship shape. A shape generation algorithm is proposed and appropriate mathematical models are constructed. Simulation results show that the optimized shape gives an improvement in the value of the composite objective function compared with a reference shape.

Feature-based fusion of infrared and visible dynamic images using target detection

We employ the target detection to improve the performance of the feature-based fusion of infrared and visible dynamic images, which forms a novel fusion scheme. First, the target detection is used to segment the source image sequences into target and background regions. Then, the dual-tree complex wavelet transform （DT-CWT） is proposed to decompose all the source image sequences. Different fusion rules are applied respectively in target and background regions to preserve the target information as much as possi-ble. Real world infrared and visible image sequences are used to validate the performance of the proposed novel scheme. Compared with the previous fusion approaches of image sequences, the improvements of shift invariance, temporal stability and consistency, and computation cost are all ensured.

Fusion of urban remote image based on multi-characteristics

A fusion approach is proposed to refine the resolution of urban multi-spectral images using the corresponding high-resolution panchromatic （PAN） images. Firstly, the two images are decomposed by wavelet transformation, and five texture features are extracted from high-frequency detailed sub-images. Then a multi-characteristics fusion rule is used to merge wavelet coefficients from the two images according to the extracted features. Experimental results indicate that, comparing with the non-characteristic methods, the proposed method can efficiently preserve the spectral information while improving the spatial resolution of the urban remote sensing images.

Hybrid analytical resolution approach based on ambiguity function for attitude determination

When satellite navigation receivers are equipped with multiple antennas, they can deliver attitude information. In previous researches, carrier phase differencing measurement equations were built in the earth-centered, earth-fixed (ECEF) co- ordinate, and attitude angles could be obtained through the rotation matrix between the body frame (BF) and the local level frame (LLF). Different from the conventional methods, a hybrid algorithm is presented to resolve attitude parameters utilizing the single differencing (SD) carrier phase equations established in LLF. Assuming that the cycle integer ambiguity is known, the measure- ment equations have attitude analytical resolutions by using simultaneous single difference equations for two in-view satellites. In addition, the algorithm is capable of reducing the search integer space into countable 2D discrete points and the ambiguity function method (AFM) resolves the ambiguity function within the analytical solutions space. In the case of frequency division multiple access (FDMA) for the Russian Global Orbiting Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS), a receiver clock bias estimation is employed to evaluate its carrier phase. An evaluating variable and a weighted factor are introduced to assess the integer ambiguity initialization. By static and dynamic ground experiments, the results show that the proposed approach is effective, with enough accuracy and low computation. It can satisfy attitude determination in cases of GPS alone and combined with GLONASS.

Kernel based visual tracking with scale invariant features

The kernel based tracking has two disadvantages： the tracking window size cannot be adjusted efficiently, and the kernel based color distribution may not have enough ability to discriminate object from clutter background. For boosting up the feature＇s discriminating ability, both scale invariant features and kernel based color distribution features are used as descriptors of tracked object. The proposed algorithm can keep tracking object of varying scales even when the surrounding background is similar to the object＇s appearance.