We present a novel motion estimation technique for image-based river velocimetry. It is based on the so-called optical flow, which is a well developed method for rigid motion estimation in image sequences, devised in computer vision community. Contrary to PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) techniques, optical flow formulation is flexible enough to incorporate physics equations that govern the observed quantity motion. Over the past years, it has been adopted by experimental fluid dynamics community where many new models were introduced to better represent different fluids motions, (see (Heitz et al., 2010) for a review). Our optical flow is based on the scalar transport equation and is augmented with a weighted diffusion term to compensate for small scale (non-captured) contributions. Additionally, since there is no ground truth data for such type of image sequences, we present a new evaluation method to assess the results. It is based on trajectory reconstruction of few Lagrangian particles of interest and a direct comparison against their manually-reconstructed trajectories. The new motion estimation technique outperformed traditional optical flow and PIV-based methods.
In an unmanned aircraft vehicle, a navigation system is needed to calculate its orientation and translation. The navigation system can utilize data from the accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, and GPS. The orientation can be precisely calculated from the accelerometer and magnetometer data when the sensor is in a static state. Meanwhile, under dynamic conditions, the orientation can be more precisely calculated from the gyroscope data. In order to obtain the robust navigation system, a data fusion based on Kalman filter is built to calculate the orientation from the accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer. The Kalman filter trusts more in the data from the accelerometer and magnetometer when the UAV is static and trusts more in to the gyroscope data when the UAV is in dynamic conditions. Meanwhile, the UAV translation is obtained by performing data fusion of the accelerometer data with location data from the GPS sensor. The Kalman filter combines data from the accelerometer and GPS when available, otherwise trusts in data from the accelerometer only. The trust level shifting is done by changing the measurement noise covariance. The data fusion based on Kalman filter provides more accurately the orientation and translation data. The orientation as a result of the calculation from the gyroscope has an average error of 18.12%, while the orientation as a result of the accelerometer and magnetometer has an error of 1.3%. By using Kalman filter-based data fusion, the error of the orientation decreases to 0.87%
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