High-Accuracy Absolute-Position-Aided Code Phase Tracking Based on RTK/INS Deep Integration in Challenging Static Scenarios

Many multi-sensor navigation systems urgently demand accurate positioning initialization from global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) in challenging static scenarios. However, ground blockages against line-of-sight (LOS) signal reception make it difficult for GNSS users. Steering local codes in GNSS basebands is a desiring way to correct instantaneous signal phase misalignment, efficiently gathering useful signal power and increasing positioning accuracy. Besides, inertial navigation systems (INSs) have been used as a well-complementary dead reckoning (DR) sensor for GNSS receivers in kinematic scenarios resisting various interferences since early. But little work focuses on the case of whether the INS can improve GNSS receivers in static scenarios. Thus, this paper proposes an enhanced navigation system deeply integrated with low-cost INS solutions and GNSS high-accuracy carrier-based positioning. First, an absolute code phase is predicted from base station information, and integrated solution of the INS DR and real-time kinematic (RTK) results through an extended Kalman filter (EKF). Then, a numerically controlled oscillator (NCO) leverages the predicted code phase to improve the alignment between instantaneous local code phases and received ones. The proposed algorithm is realized in a vector-tracking GNSS software-defined radio (SDR). Real-world experiments demonstrate the proposed SDR regarding estimating time-of-arrival (TOA) and positioning accuracy.

To Find Waldo You Need Contextual Cues: Debiasing Who's Waldo

We present a debiased dataset for the Person-centric Visual Grounding (PCVG) task first proposed by Cui et al. (2021) in the Who's Waldo dataset. Given an image and a caption, PCVG requires pairing up a person's name mentioned in a caption with a bounding box that points to the person in the image. We find that the original Who's Waldo dataset compiled for this task contains a large number of biased samples that are solvable simply by heuristic methods; for instance, in many cases the first name in the sentence corresponds to the largest bounding box, or the sequence of names in the sentence corresponds to an exact left-to-right order in the image. Naturally, models trained on these biased data lead to over-estimation of performance on the benchmark. To enforce models being correct for the correct reasons, we design automated tools to filter and debias the original dataset by ruling out all examples of insufficient context, such as those with no verb or with a long chain of conjunct names in their captions. Our experiments show that our new sub-sampled dataset contains less bias with much lowered heuristic performances and widened gaps between heuristic and supervised methods. We also demonstrate the same benchmark model trained on our debiased training set outperforms that trained on the original biased (and larger) training set on our debiased test set. We argue our debiased dataset offers the PCVG task a more practical baseline for reliable benchmarking and future improvements.

Supporting GNSS Baseband Using Smartphone IMU and Ultra-Tight Integration

A great surge of the global navigation satellite system (GNSS) development excavates the potential of promoting pomposity in many state-of-art technologies, e.g., autonomous ground vehicles (AGVs). Nevertheless, the GNSS is fragile to the various ground interferences which significantly break down the continuity of the navigation system. Meanwhile, the GNSS-based next-generation navigation devices are being developed to be smaller, more low-cost, and lightweight as forecasted by the commercial market. This work aims to answer the question of whether the smartphone inertial measurement unit (IMU) is sufficient to support the GNSS baseband. Thus, a cascaded ultra-tightly integrated GNSS/inertial navigation system (INS) technique, where the consumer-level smartphone sensors are used, is proposed to improve the baseband performance of GNSS software-defined radios (SDRs). To integrate the GNSS baseband, a Doppler value is predicted based on an integrated extended Kalman filter (EKF) navigator where the pseudo-range-state-based measurements of GNSS and INS are fused, and it is used to assist the numerically controlled oscillator (NCO) algorithms. Then, an ultra-tight integration platform is built with an upgraded GNSS SDR of which baseband processing is integrated with the INS mechanization algorithm. Finally, by comparing with the previous algorithms, both tracking-level and carrier-based positioning performances are assessed in the proposed platform for the smartphone-IMU-aided GNSS baseband via kinematic AGV field tests. The experimental results demonstrate the performance of the tracking ability and the high-precision positioning of the proposed ultra-tight integration algorithms using the smartphone IMU.