Thursday, November 30, 2006

GPS That Never Fails

TechReview claims in GPS That Never Fails that a breakthrough in vision processing has been developed that provides a highly accurate way to fill gaps in Global Positioning System availability:

'Drive down a Manhattan street, and your car's navigation system will blink in and out of service. That's because the Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite signals used by car navigation systems and other technologies get blocked by buildings. GPS also doesn't work well indoors, inside tunnels and subway systems, or in caves--a problem for everyone from emergency workers to soldiers. But in a recent advance that has not yet been published, researchers at Sarnoff, in Princeton, NJ, say their prototype technology--which uses advanced processing of stereo video images to fill in GPS gaps--can maintain location accuracy to within one meter after a half-kilometer of moving through so-called GPS-denied environments.


That kind of resolution is a major advance in the field, giving GPS-like accuracy over distances relevant to intermittent service gaps that might be encountered in urban combat or downtown driving.'

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