Comprehensive Heading Error Processing Technique Using Image Denoising and Tilt-Induced Error Compensation for Polarization Compass

Bionic polarization navigation has a broad variety of application in diverse fields for high reliability and strong robustness to interference, fundamental to which is the use of a polarization compass based on polarized light cues. Nevertheless, dramatical reduction of the orientation accuracy resulted from the noise in a measured angle of polarization (AoP) and the tilted angles of a polarization compass during operation gives imperative influence on navigation precision. Herein, we investigate how to improve the navigation accuracy effectively by the proposed comprehensive heading error processing technique for a polarization compass, where a novel denoising scheme is designed to eliminate the noise in AoP images directly by integrating the strength of iterative variance-stabilizing transformation (IVST) and adaptive soft interval thresholding (SIT) so as to compensate the following tilt-induced error accurately. Subsequently, a promising compensation approach inspired by efficient extreme learning machine (EELM) is introduced to correct the tilt-induced error caused by realistic execution. The AoP image denoising advance and the tilt-induced error modeling advance combine to produce remarkable performance gains on the heading error. Experimental results and comparisons with prior arts reveal that the proposed comprehensive heading error processing technique is highly appealing in terms of improving the orientation accuracy for a polarization compass with superiority to state-of-the-art alternatives.