Drogue detection for vision-based autonomous aerial refueling via low rank and sparse decomposition with multiple features

The technology of vision-based probe-and-drogue autonomous aerial refueling is an amazing task in modern aviation for both manned and unmanned aircraft. A key issue is to determine the relative orientation and position of the drogue and the probe accurately for relative navigation system during the approach phase, which requires locating the drogue precisely. Drogue detection is a challenging task due to disorderly motion of drogue caused by both the tanker wake vortex and atmospheric turbulence. In this paper, the problem of drogue detection is considered as a problem of moving object detection. A drogue detection algorithm based on low rank and sparse decomposition with local multiple features is proposed. The global and local information of drogue is introduced into the detection model in a unified way. The experimental results on real autonomous aerial refueling videos show that the proposed drogue detection algorithm is effective. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.