一种自主空中加油视觉导航图像处理方法

针对自主空中加油近距导航问题,提出了一种锥套检测和跟踪的视觉导航图像处理方法.对于锥套检测,首先利用阈值法和数学形态学方法消除图像干扰,然后提取所有的轮廓并对轮廓进行检查,最后匹配得到目标锥套轮廓.对于锥套跟踪,以上一帧图像的定位结果作为先验信息来确定当前帧图像的可能范围,然后采用上述锥套检测方法进行处理.最后,以一架微型六旋翼飞行器作为受油机,利用自主空中加油试验台获取的真实飞行图像,对所提出的视觉导航图像处理方法进行了验证.试验结果表明:所提出的视觉导航图像处理方法具有较高的实时性及可靠性,能够满足自主空中加油的要求.

An Image Processing Method of Vision Navigation for Autonomous Aerial Refueling

A visual navigation image processing method for drogue detection and tracking is presented in this paper. For drogue detection, firstly threshold method and mathematical morphology method are used to eliminate image interference. Then, all the contours are extracted and checked. Lastly, the contour of the target drogue is matched. For drogue tracking, the positioning result of the last frame image is used as a prior information to determine the possible range of the current frame image. And the drogue detection method is adopted again. Finally, the proposed image processing method of vision navigation is validated using real flight images, which are captured from an autonomous aerial refueling test bed using a micro six-rotor aircraft as receiver aircraft. The experimental results indicates that the proposed image processing method has high real-time performance and reliability, which can meet the requirements of autonomous aerial refueling.