Automatic Image Based Positioning System

Position of the vehicle is essential to navigate the vehicle along a desired path without any human interference. Global Positioning System (GPS) loses significant power due to signal attenuation caused by construction buildings. A good positioning system should have both good positioning accuracy and reliability. The purpose of this thesis is to implement a new positioning system using camera and examine the accuracy of the estimated vehicle position on a real-time scenario. The major focus of the thesis is to develop two algorithms for estimation of the position of the vehicle using a static camera and to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms. The proposed positioning system is based on two different processes. First process uses center of mass to estimate the position, while the second one utilizes gradient information to estimate the position of the vehicle. Two versions of the positioning systems are implemented. One version uses center of mass concept and background subtraction to estimate the position of the vehicle and the other version calculates gradients to estimate the position of the vehicle. Both algorithms are sensitive to point of view of the image i.e height of the camera. On comparing both algorithms, gradient based algorithm is less sensitive to the camera view. Finally, the performance is greater dependent on the height of the camera position for center of mass positioning system, as compared to the gradient positioning system but the accuracy of the systems can be improved by increasing the height of the camera. In terms of the speed of processing, the gradient positioning system is faster than the center of mass positioning system. The first algorithm, based on center of mass has 89.75\% accuracy with a standard deviation of 3 pixels and the second algorithm has an accuracy of 92.26\%. Accuracy of the system is estimated from the number of false detected positions