Suitable-Matching Areas’ Selection Method Based on Multi-Level Saliency

Abstract

Scene-matching navigation is one of the essential technologies for achieving precise navigation in satellite-denied environments. Selecting suitable-matching areas is crucial for planning trajectory and reducing yaw. Most traditional selection methods of suitable-matching areas use hierarchical screening based on multiple feature indicators. However, these methods rarely consider the interrelationship between different feature indicators and use the same set of screening thresholds for different categories of images, which has poor versatility and can easily cause mis-selection and omission. To solve this problem, a suitable-matching areas’ selection method based on multi-level saliency is proposed. The matching performance score is obtained by fusing several segmentation levels’ salient feature extraction results and performing weighted calculations with the sub-image edge density. Compared with the hierarchical screening methods, the matching performance of the candidate areas selected by our algorithm is at least 22.2% higher, and it also has a better matching ability in different scene categories. In addition, the number of missed and wrong selections is significantly reduced. The average matching accuracy of the top three areas selected by our method reached 0.8549, 0.7993, and 0.7803, respectively, under the verification of multiple matching algorithms. Experimental results show this paper’s suitable-matching areas’ selection method is more robust.