A method for online global pose estimation of aerial images by alignment with a georeferenced 3D model is presented.Motion stereo is used to reconstruct a dense local height patch from an image pair. The global pose is inferred from the 3D transform between the local height patch and the model.For efficiency, the sought 3D similarity transform is found by least-squares minimizations of three 2D subproblems.The method does not require any landmarks or reference points in the 3D model, but an approximate initialization of the global pose, in our case provided by onboard navigation sensors, is assumed.Real aerial images from helicopter and aircraft flights are used to evaluate the method. The results show that the accuracy of the position and orientation estimates is significantly improved compared to the initialization and our method is more robust than competing methods on similar datasets.The proposed matching error computed between the transformed patch and the map clearly indicates whether a reliable pose estimate has been obtained.

For navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), attitude estimation is essential. We present a method for attitude estimation (pitch and roll angle) from aerial fisheye images through horizon detection. The method is based on edge detection and a probabilistic Hough voting scheme.  In a flight scenario, there is often some prior knowledge of the vehicle altitude and attitude. We exploit this prior to make the attitude estimation more robust by letting the edge pixel votes be weighted based on the probability distributions for the altitude and pitch and roll angles. The method does not require any sky/ground segmentation as most horizon detection methods do. Our method has been evaluated on aerial fisheye images from the internet. The horizon is robustly detected in all tested images. The deviation in the attitude estimate between our automated horizon detection and a manual detection is less than 1 degree.

Attitude (pitch and roll angle) estimation from visual information is necessary for GPS-free navigation of airborne vehicles. We propose a highly accurate method to estimate the attitude by horizon detection in fisheye images. A Canny edge detector and a probabilistic Hough voting scheme are used to compute an approximate attitude and the corresponding horizon line in the image. Horizon edge pixels are extracted in a band close to the approximate horizon line. The attitude estimates are refined through registration of the extracted edge pixels with the geometrical horizon from a digital elevation map (DEM), in our case the SRTM3 database, extracted at a given approximate position. The proposed method has been evaluated using 1629 images from a flight trial with flight altitudes up to 600 m in an area with ground elevations ranging from sea level up to 500 m. Compared with the ground truth from a filtered inertial measurement unit (IMU)/GPS solution, the standard deviation for the pitch and roll angle errors obtained with 30 Mpixel images are 0.04° and 0.05°, respectively, with mean errors smaller than 0.02°. To achieve the high-accuracy attitude estimates, the ray refraction in the earth's atmosphere has been taken into account. The attitude errors obtained on real images are less or equal to those achieved on synthetic images for previous methods with DEM refinement, and the errors are about one order of magnitude smaller than for any previous vision-based method without DEM refinement.

The Exponential Linear Unit (ELU) has been proven to speed up learning and improve the classification performance over activation functions such as ReLU and Leaky ReLU for convolutional neural networks. The reasons behind the improved behavior are that ELU reduces the bias shift, it saturates for large negative inputs and it is continuously differentiable. However, it remains open whether ELU has the optimal shape and we address the quest for a superior activation function.We use a new formulation to tune a piecewise linear activation function during training, to investigate the above question, and learn the shape of the locally optimal activation function. With this tuned activation function, the classification performance is improved and the resulting, learned activation function shows to be ELU-shaped irrespective if it is initialized as a RELU, LReLU or ELU. Interestingly, the learned activation function does not exactly pass through the origin indicating that a shifted ELU-shaped activation function is preferable. This observation leads us to introduce the Shifted Exponential Linear Unit (ShELU) as a new activation function.Experiments on Cifar-100 show that the classification performance is further improved when using the ShELU activation function in comparison with ELU. The improvement is achieved when learning an individual bias shift for each neuron.