IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, MARCH 2009
AbstractThis paper describes a precision positioning technique that can be applied to vehicles in urban areas. The proposed
technique mitigates Global Positioning System (GPS) multipath
by means of an omnidirectional infrared (IR) camera that can
eliminate the need for invisible satellites [a satellite detected by
the receiver but without line of sight (LOS)] by using IR images.
Some simple GPS multipath mitigation techniques, such as the
installation of antennas away from buildings and using choke ring
antennas, are well known. Further, various correlator techniques
can also be employed. However, when a direct signal cannot be
received by the antenna, these techniques do not provide satisfactory results because they presume that the antenna chiefly
receives direct signals. On the other hand, the proposed technique
can mitigate GPS multipath, even if a direct signal cannot be
received because it can recognize the surrounding environment by
means of an omnidirectional IR camera. With the IR camera, the
sky appears distinctively dark; this facilitates the detection of the
borderline between the sky and the surrounding buildings, which
are captured in white, due to the difference in the atmospheric
transmittance rate between visible light and IR rays. Positioning
is performed only with visible satellites having fewer multipath
errors and without using invisible satellites. With the proposed system, static and kinematic evaluations in which invisible satellites
are discriminated through observation using an omnidirectional
IR camera are conducted. Hence, signals are received even if
satellites are hidden behind buildings; furthermore, the exclusion
of satellites having large errors from the positioning computation
becomes possible. The evaluation results confirm the effectiveness
of the proposed technique and the feasibility of highly accurate
positioning.
Index TermsGlobal Positioning System (GPS), infrared (IR)
image sensors, multipath mitigation, self-positioning, urban areas.
I. I NTRODUCTION
URRENTLY, Global Positioning System (GPS) applications are rapidly gaining popularity. With the planned
GPS modernization program of the U.S., European Satellite
Navigation System (GALILEO) of Europe, the Global Naviga-
Manuscript received August 10, 2007; revised January 14, 2008. First
published February 2, 2009; current version published February 27, 2009. This
work was supported in part by the Research Fellowships from the Japan Society
for the Promotion of Science for Young Scientists 18-467. The Associate Editor
for this paper was N. Zheng.
J. Meguro and T. Murata are with the Graduate School of Science and
Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo 162-0041, Japan (e-mail: meguro@
power.mech.waseda.ac.jp; murata@power.mech.waseda.ac.jp).
J. Takiguchi is with Kamakura Works, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation,
Kamakura 247-8520, Japan, and also with Waseda University, Tokyo 162-0041,
Japan (e-mail: Takiguchi.Junichi@dp.MitsubishiElectric.co.jp).
Y. Amano and T. Hashizume are with the Advanced Research Institute for
Science and Engineering, Waseda University, Tokyo 169-8555, Japan (e-mail:
hasizume@waseda.jp; yoshiha@waseda.jp).
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TITS.2008.2011688
MEGURO et al.: GPS MULTIPATH MITIGATION FOR URBAN AREA USING OMNIDIRECTIONAL INFRARED CAMERA
23
satellites. This technique employs an omnidirectional IR camera and a satellite orbit simulator to automatically determine the
geometrical relation between the satellites and the obstructions,
as seen from the vehicle; this enables operation with satellites
that only have small multipath errors by excluding invisible
satellites from the positioning computation.
II. O UTLINE OF THE P ROPOSED T ECHNIQUE
To exclude the radio waves emitted from invisible satellites,
the satellite positions, the movable bodys position and attitude,
and the physical relation with the obstructions blocking the
radio waves from the satellites must be identified at all times
to determine the visibility of the satellites. The technique
proposed herein involves excluding the invisible satellites by
observing the satellite positions with a satellite orbit simulator,
the movable bodys heading angle with an angular displacement
sensor like a gyro or inertial measurement system (IMU), and
the obstruction positions with an omnidirectional IR camera.
The specific algorithm employed in this technique is shown in
Fig. 1. First, to obtain the elevation and the azimuth angles
of the satellite as seen from the movable body, the position
of the satellite is estimated from the ephemeris data. Then,
the satellite position is converted into the elevation and the
azimuth angles of the satellite as seen from the movable body
by using the approximate position of the movable body and
the angular displacement sensor. Here, even if the approximate
position of the movable body is significantly shifted from the
actual position, the shift is small in comparison to the distance
between the satellite and the movable body; thus, the elevation
and the azimuth angles are hardly affected and are sufficient
for accurate computation, even for GPS point positioning.
The system then proceeds with a simple segmentation of the
omnidirectional IR camera image to enable an understanding
of the obstruction positions as seen from the movable body.
The estimation of time needed to process an image is a
few milliseconds. After the obstructions are abstracted away,
the omnidirectional IR camera image is set on the plane of
the elevation and azimuth angles. Then, on the image with the
obstructions abstracted away, the satellite positions are plotted
to determine the visibility of each satellite from the overlapping
of the satellites and the obstructions. Finally, the positioning is
performed only using visible satellites having small multipath
errors and without using the invisible satellites.
III. A CQUISITION OF F AR -IR O MNIDIRECTIONAL I MAGES
A. Developed Omnidirectional Far-IR Camera
The omnidirectional IR camera developed in this paper is
shown in Fig. 2. This camera can generate IR images with an
elevation of 20 70 for the entire surrounding area over 360
[28], [29]; it is capable of taking clear images of buildings, even
at night. A two-mirror optic system is adopted because it is
easier to design than wide-angle lens like fisheye in the case
of far IR rays. Fig. 3 shows images simultaneously taken by a
visible-light fisheye camera and an omnidirectional IR camera
at the same place during the day as well as at night. With the
IR camera, the sky is distinctively dark; this makes it easy to
detect the borderline between the sky and the buildings, which
are captured in white, due to the difference in the atmospheric
transmittance rate between visible light and IR rays [30]. Furthermore, halation of the charge-coupled device (CCD) image
sensor caused by sunlight and street lights is observed in the red
circle in the fisheye camera image in Fig. 3, whereas this is not
observed in the omnidirectional IR camera images. Therefore,
using an omnidirectional IR camera enables a robust determination of the borderline between an object and the sky in the presence of outdoor lights and other disturbances; thus, it is possible
to identify the borderline in a reliable manner, even in the case
of image processing using simple binarization (see Table I).
B. Calibration of the Omnidirectional IR Camera
It is essential to determine the accurate intracamera parameters when surveying with the camera; furthermore, it is necessary to employ an accurate method of projection. However,
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, MARCH 2009
Fig. 2. Omnidirectional IR camera developed in this study. (a) Omnidirectional IR camera. (b) Description of the optic system.
Fig. 3. Comparison between images from the color fisheye camera and the omnidirectional IR camera. (a) Daytime. (b) Nighttime.
TABLE I
IR CAMERA CONFIGURATION
Fig. 6.
MEGURO et al.: GPS MULTIPATH MITIGATION FOR URBAN AREA USING OMNIDIRECTIONAL INFRARED CAMERA
Fig. 7.
Two-dimensional positioning accuracy comparison. (a) 121 237127 080. (b) 195 341210 371.
Fig. 8.
Number of satellites during static evaluation. (a) 121 237127 080. (b) 195 341210 371.
210 371 GPS seconds, at a predetermined position in the premises of Kamakura Works, Mitsubishi Electric Corporation
(see Figs. 5 and 6). The data were obtained at a rate of 1 Hz. The
surroundings of the observation point comprised scattered tall
buildings and connecting corridors, which makes it a susceptible environment for satellite masking. The receiver used was a
ZXtreme from Ashtech (currently Thales Navigation) with the
elevation angle mask set at 10 . The reference station was at an
electronic reference point of the Geographical Survey Institute
of Japan (Fujisawa station; baseline length of 5 km). The
positioning computation was performed with the postprocessing software GrafNav 7.5, and the results were compared on
the basis of whether the computation was processed with or
without invisible satellite data. The quality number of Waypoint
GrafNav, in brief, is a factor generated by GrafNav for each
output solution, which ranges from 1 to 6, to indicate the
reliability of the solution (see Table II).
Hereinafter, the term fixed solution implies an output
solution with a quality number of 1, float solution implies
an output solution with a quality number of between 2 and 4,
and DGPS solution implies an output solution with a quality
number of 5 or 6. GrafNav also generates a unique indicator (i.e., DD_DOP) to indicate the dispersion of the satellite
geometry. When this value is extremely large, GrafNav does
not output a result on that particular epoch. In other words, if
the output from GrafNav is significantly deviated from the true
value, the deviation is most likely caused by the effects of radio
wave disturbances including multipath rather than the effect of
satellite geometry.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, MARCH 2009
Fig. 9. DOP comparison. (a) 121 237127 080. (b) 195 341210 371.
TABLE III
NUMBER OF SIGNALS OF DIFFERENT POSITIONING QUALITY AT
STATIC EVALUATION (B)
(k)
s
(k)
(k)
u = ru + I + T + c(tu t ) + u
(1)
(k)
(2)
(k)
(k)
(k)
(3)
(k)
(k)
MEGURO et al.: GPS MULTIPATH MITIGATION FOR URBAN AREA USING OMNIDIRECTIONAL INFRARED CAMERA
27
Fig. 10. Quality number comparison. (a) 121 237127 080. (b) 195 341210 371.
Fig. 11. Carrier-to-noise ratio and multipath error. (a) PRN21. (b) PRN3. (c) PRN25.
path errors of PRN3, which in the same time period were visible
at approximately the same angle of elevation as that of PRN21,
are shown in Fig. 11(b).
From Fig. 11(a) and (b), it is observed that the invisible satellite PRN21 has extremely large multipath errors (approximately
2060 m) compared to the visible satellite PRN3. In other
words, in time period A, excluding satellites with multipath
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, MARCH 2009
Fig. 12.
Fig. 13.
Fig. 14.
MEGURO et al.: GPS MULTIPATH MITIGATION FOR URBAN AREA USING OMNIDIRECTIONAL INFRARED CAMERA
29
Fig. 17.
with the exclusion of PRN7, with which the multipath errors are
presumed to be large. From these results, it can be stated that
the proposed technique is effective in kinematic positioning as
well as static positioning.
Fig. 16. Vehicle trajectory result without proposal.
know that there are many instances where the number of satellites is below 4 because of the tall buildings and the connecting
corridors scattered around the observation point. Fig. 16 shows
the 2-D projection of the moving bodys position output by
GrafNav. When Fig. 16 is compared with Fig. 12, we can
confirm that the moving bodys position is estimated with a
relatively high accuracy, except in the region marked C (time
range from 461 530.4 to 461 544.7 GPS seconds), where the
position is obviously astray of the actual route. Meanwhile,
the HDOP in region C lies in the range of 2.79 to 6.62,
which is not large; the cause of this is surmised to be the
fact that the positioning is performed using satellites with large
multipath errors. Further, by plotting the satellite geometry on
the omnidirectional IR camera image shown in Fig. 15, we find
that, in region C, the signals from PRN3, PRN7, PRN11,
PRN16, and PRN19 were received; however, PRN7 was an
invisible satellite. In fact, there were four visible satellites and
one invisible satellite. Therefore, it may be presumed that PRN7
had large multipath errors in region C. Given these factors, we
postprocessed region C once again on GrafNav after automatically excluding the invisible satellites by using the proposed
technique, and the results are shown in Fig. 17. Here, in the
region where the position was greatly misaligned, we can see
a significant improvement through the positioning computation
VII. C ONCLUSION
Against the background of the increasing number of satellites
in the future, it is essential to establish a technology that can
select satellites with small multipath errors to realize highly
accurate positioning at all times. Thus, in this paper, we have
proposed a technique with which the obstruction of satellite
signals can be determined using an omnidirectional IR camera,
allowing improvement of the accuracy of mobile positioning in
urban areas by excluding the invisible satellites.
With the proposed system, static and kinematic evaluations
in which the invisible satellites were discriminated through observations using an omnidirectional IR camera were conducted.
Hence, signals were received even while the satellites were
hidden behind buildings, and the exclusion of satellites having
large errors in the positioning computation became possible.
The test results confirmed the effectiveness of the proposed
technique and the feasibility of highly accurate positioning.
R EFERENCES
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GPS/GNSS Symp., Tokyo, Japan.
[2] T. Stansell, Jr., GPS modernization and new signal structure, in Proc.
GPS/GNSS Symp., Tokyo, Japan, 2006.
[3] C. Kee and B. Parkinson, Calibration of multipath errors on GPS pseudorange measurements, in Proc. 7th Int. Tech. Meeting Satell. Division Inst.
Navig., 1994, pp. 353362.
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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INTELLIGENT TRANSPORTATION SYSTEMS, VOL. 10, NO. 1, MARCH 2009
[30] A. Takeya, T. Kuroda, K.-I. Nishiguchi, and A. Ichikawa, Omnidirectional vision system using two mirrors, in Proc. SPIE Novel Opt. Syst.
Design Optim., 1998, vol. 3430, pp. 5060.
[31] J.-I. Meguro, T. Murata, H. Nishimura, Y. Amano, T. Hasizume, and
J.-I. Takiguchi, Development of positioning technique using omnidirectional IR camera and aerial survey data, in Proc. IEEE/ASME Int.
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Taishi Murata received the B.Eng. and M.Eng. degrees in 2006 and 2008, respectively from Waseda
University, Tokyo, Japan, where he is currently a
graduate student.
His interests are in Global Positioning System
technology, mobile mapping systems, and unique
positioning systems.