Visual-inertial State Estimation for the Civil Aircraft Landing in Low Visibility Conditions

This paper proposes a visual-inertial navigation algorithm for the civil aircraft landing in low visibility conditions. The algorithm includes the following key steps: 1) Detect and extract real runway features from forward-looking infrared (FLIR) image; 2) Generate synthetic runway features based on airport geo-referenced data; 3) Set up vision measurement and fuse inertial data with visual cues in SR-UKF; 4) Correct the INS measurements by the estimated errors. The experimental results demonstrate that our proposed algorithm can be used for civil aircraft precise landing in GPS-denied and low visibility environments.