Mapping the spatio-temporal visibility of global navigation satellites in the urban road areas based on panoramic imagery

Abstract

The satellite visibility number of GNSS is an important indicator for evaluating its availability for positioning and navigation. In urban areas, urban canyons cause serious satellite signals block, resulting in positioning uncertainty. Many studies used 3D city models to evaluate the visible satellites in some areas at a certain time. Nevertheless, this kind of method is difficult to apply because 3D models are not widely available. This paper thus proposes an easy method to evaluate the visibility of satellites with widely available street view panoramic imagery and GNSS ephemeris. The proposed method utilizes the locations of street view panoramic imagery and the associated GNSS ephemeris to calculate the visible satellite number at different times. Hence, the visible satellite number at a specific time can be mapped. Moreover, the visibility of satellites can be predicted according to its orbit parameters. To evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method, Wuhan and Shanghai were taken to map post-event, real-time and forecast GNSS visibility. The experiments demonstrated that the proposed method provides a light weighted and easy to use solution to map the spatio-temporal visibility of satellites in urban areas, which is an important reference for GNSS stations layout and positioning qualities evaluation.