Integration of GPS and monocular vision for land vehicle navigation in urban area

For land vehicle navigation in urban area, Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers often suffer from the lack of positioning accuracy, availability, and continuity due to insufficient number of visible satellites and multipath errors. To mitigate this problem, this paper proposes an efficient hybrid positioning method combining a single frequency GPS receiver and a monocular vision sensor. The proposed method is advantageous in that it requires only low-cost hardware and no external map aiding. Compared with existing vision-based methods, the proposed method directly measures absolute heading angle based on the images of straight road segments. For the reason, the proposed method is resilient to multipath errors. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by the experiments with field-collected real measurements; one with good satellite visibility and the others with poor satellite visibility. Comparison with existing positioning methods demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed method in urban area.