A Hybrid Positioning System with Heterogeneous Binocular Vision and Photodetector

Single-modal visual positioning systems face critical limitations in complex environments, particularly in operational coverage and robustness. This paper presents a hybrid positioning system to overcome these issues. It combines a Fisheye Image Sensor (FIS), a Pinhole Image Sensor (PIS), and a photodetector (PD), which jointly improves positioning coverage and accuracy. The system employs a quadratic LED Array as the positioning beacon, with the PD performing rough positioning and a heterogeneous binocular vision architecture enabling precise positioning. Through the establishment and analysis of an FIS error model, a depth-compensated vision positioning algorithm is proposed to mitigate radial distortion. Subsequently, an error arbitration-based heterogeneous vision positioning method is designed by comparing the range models of PIS and FIS, enabling dynamic switching between the two sensors via error-optimized modeling. Experimental results demonstrate: (1) Under illumination from a single quadratic LED array indoors, the system achieves a 4× expansion in positioning range, covering a 6m-diameter area at 3.0m height. (2) In a 6×6×3 m³ volume, the system achieves an average positioning error of 8.32 cm in near-field zones and 12.87 cm in far-field zones, yielding a total mean error of 9.712 cm.