[magicalhippo]

Well if you combine it with dead reckoning, I guess even a war torn field could be referenced against a pre-war image?

I mean, a prominent tree along a stone wall might be sufficient to be fairly sure, if you at least got some idea of the area you're in via dead reckoning.

[hef19898]

And deadrecking is already standard in anything military anyways. For decades.

As an added data source to improve navigation accuracy, the approach sure is interesting (I am no expert in nav systems, just remotely familiar with some of them). Unless the approach was tried in real world scenarios, and developed to proper standards, we won't see it used in a milotary context so. Or civilian aerospace.

Especially since GPS is dirt cheap and works for most drone applications just fine (GPS, Galileo, Glanos doesn't matter).

[magicalhippo]

For a loitering drone I imagine dead reckoning would cause significant drift unless corrected by external input. GPS is great when it's available but can be jammed.

I was thinking along the lines of preprocessing satellite images to extract prominent features, then using modern image processing to try to match against the observed features.

A quite underconstrained problem in general, but if you have a decent idea of where you should be due to dead reckoning, then perhaps quite doable?