cs.ROAug 9, 2026

Protection Levels for Vision-Based Pose Estimation

Authors: Olivia Beyer BruvikRomeo ValentinMarc R. SchlichtingDon WalkerMykel J. Kochenderfer

Organizations: Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305 USA · A3 by Airbus LLC, Sunnyvale, CA 94086 USA

Abstract

Vision-based navigation complements Global Navigation Satellite Systems, but certification demands integrity guarantees that account for faulty measurements. Previous work presented a probabilistic computer vision pipeline for runway-based pose estimation with fault detection inspired by Receiver Autonomous Integrity Monitoring. This work extends that framework by deriving protection levels, which provide probabilistic bounds on pose error that remain valid under undetected faults. We present an algorithm for computing protection levels for the nonlinear Perspective-nn-Point problem applied to an aviation setting. The algorithm covers all six degrees of freedom of the aircraft pose (position and orientation) directly. We analyze the effect of measurement redundancy, pixel-level prediction uncertainty, and runway distance on the resulting protection levels. To make the results tangible, we demonstrate tradeoffs in the protection levels on an illustrative runway example.

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