Application of digital elevation model for estimation of airborne platform with data fusion

In this paper, we propose a method for estimating the position of an airborne platform using a digital elevation model (DEM) through data fusion. Given information of a terrain, the localization of the platform is possible through a template matching process if a local DEM under the platform can be measured. For better position estimation, we calculate the gradients of DEM and use it in the matching process. The position of the platform is determined as a point that has a minimum matching error in DEM and its gradients. To combine the error costs, we employed information theory to adaptively determine the weight between data. Based on the suggested method, the matching error can be improved by 55%.