Performance Evaluation of Stereo Vision Aided Loosely Coupled GNSS/SINS Integration for Land Vehicle Navigation in Different Urban Environments

Abstract

In urban environments, the positioning performance of global navigation satellite system (GNSS) degrades severely due to the harsh environment, which will be improved after fused with a strap-down inertial navigation system (SINS). However, due to the error accumulation, the positioning ability of GNSS/SINS integration will also decrease significantly during frequent GNSS outages. To improve the positioning accuracy, we use stereo vision to enhance the performance of GNSS/SINS integration, where GNSS and stereo vision are loosely coupled and tightly coupled with SINS under the Earth-centered Earth-fixed (ECEF) frame, respectively. To evaluate the positioning performance of the multisensor fusion system, two in-field experiments were conducted to assess the contribution of stereo vision. The results show that with the support of stereo vision and SINS, GNSS accuracy can be considerably improved by 60%–80% in complex environments, which also outperforms the GNSS/SINS integration. Besides, detailed analyses in various urban environments further demonstrate that stereo vision can significantly improve the performance of GNSS/SINS integration when a long-term GNSS anomaly occurs, but it shows no improvement for a short-term GNSS anomaly.