Precision and reliability of tightly coupled PPP GNSS and landmark monocular vision positioning

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to analyse the quality, in terms of precision and reliability, of a system which integrates—at the observation-level—landmark positions and GNSS measurements, obtained with a single camera and a digital map, and a single frequency GNSS receiver respectively. We illustrate the analysis by means of design computations, and we present the actual performance by means of a small experiment in practice. It is shown that the integration model is able to produce a position solution even when both sensors individually fail to do so. With realistic assumptions on measurement noise, the proposed integrated, low-cost system can deliver a horizontal position with a precision of better than half a meter. The external reliability of the integrated system is at the few decimetre-level, showing that the impact of undetected faults in the measurements, for instance incorrectly identified landmarks in the image, on the horizontal position is limited and acceptable, thereby confirming the fault-robustness of the system.