Heading Measurement Frame Based on Atmospheric Scattering Beams for Intelligent Vehicle

Autonomous orientation technology has major engineering significance for intelligent transportation systems (ITS) especially for the intelligent vehicle. The sky polarization characteristics offer a wealth of navigation data. At present, the most advanced polarization navigators can output this navigation information and do not require complex optical structures. However, these current navigation methods are limited severely by the sky conditions, and it is difficult to achieve orientation accurately under interference from reflected light. Here, we report a sky recognition algorithm based on a region prior approach to reduce the influence of the reflected light. Furthermore, to solve the sun fuzzy problem, a morphometric template matching in transform domain (MTMTD) strategy is proposed based on the angle of polarization (AOP). The application scope and practicability of the method are improved effectively by using all the effective pixels as a navigation unit. In addition, this method turns these pixels into curves, which means that even when only one pixel is observed, the sun fuzzy problem can be solved exactly. Our results efficiently verify the feasibility of the proposed strategy, which may provide an interesting solution for heading measurement of intelligent vehicle.