A Target Tracking and Positioning Framework for Video Satellites Based on SLAM

With the booming development in aerospace technology, the video satellite which observes the live phenomena on the ground by video shooting has gradually emerged as a new Earth observation method. And remote sensing comes into a "dynamic" era with the demand for new processing techniques, especially the near-real-time tracking and geo-positioning algorithm for ground moving targets. However, many researchers merely extract pixel-level trajectories in post-processed video products, resulting in fairly limited applications. We regard the video satellite as a robot flying in space and adopt the SLAM framework for the positioning of ground moving targets. The designed framework is based on the representative ORB-SLAM and we make improvements mainly in feature extraction, satellite pose estimation, moving target tracking and positioning. We coordinate a moving fishing boat with GPS-RTK (Real-time Kinematic) devices and a video satellite observing it simultaneously for verification and evaluation of our method. Experiments demonstrate that our framework provides reasonable geolocation of the moving target in satellite videos. Finally, some open problems and potential research directions are discussed.