A multiscale transform denoising method of the bionic polarized light compass for improving the unmanned aerial vehicle navigation accuracy

In recent years, the bionic polarized light compass has been widely studied for the unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. However, it is found from the obtained investigation results that a polarized light compass with a sensitive and high dynamic range polarimeter still provides inferior output precision of the heading angle due to the presence of the noise generating from the compass. The noise is existed not only in the angle of the polarization image acquired by polarimeters but also in the output heading data, which leads to a sharp reduction in the accuracy of a polarized light compass. Herein, we present noise analysis and a novel multiscale transform denoising method of a polarized light compass used for the unmanned aerial vehicle navigation. Specifically, a multiscale principle component analysis utilizing one-dimensional image entropy as classification criterion is directly implemented to suppress the noise in the acquired polarization image. Subsequently, a multiscale time–frequency peak filtering method using the sample entropy as classification criterion is applied for the output heading data so as to further increase the heading measurement accuracy from the denoised image above. These two approaches are combined to significantly reduce the heading error affected by different types of noises. Our experimental results indicate the proposed multiscale transform denoising method exhibits high performance in suppressing the noise of a polarized light compass used for the unmanned aerial vehicle navigation compared to existing prior arts.