Abstract
A robust and accurate aircraft pose estimation method is proposed in this paper. The aircraft pose reflects the flight status of the aircraft and accurate pose measurement is of great importance in many aerospace applications. This work aims to establish a universal framework to estimate the aircraft pose based on generic geometry structure features. In our method, line features are extracted to describe the structure of an aircraft in single images and the generic geometry features are exploited to form line groups for aircraft structure recognition. Parallel line clustering is utilized to detect the fuselage reference line and bilateral symmetry property of aircraft provides an important constraint for the extraction of wing edge lines under weak perspective projection. After identifying the main structure of the aircraft, a planes intersection method is used to obtain the 3D pose parameters based on the established line correspondences. Our proposed method can increase the measuring range of binocular vision sensors and has the advantage of not relying on 3D models, cooperative marks or other feature datasets. Experimental results show that our method can obtain reliable and accurate pose information of different types of aircraft.
Highlights
Aircraft pose estimation is a necessary technology in the field of aeronautical engineering and accurate pose parameters of the aircraft provide the fundamental information needed in many aerospace tasks, such as flight control system testing [1,2,3], auxiliary taking-off and landing [4], collision avoidance and autonomous navigation [5]
The performance of our structure extraction method was verified by real images of various types of aircraft, and synthetic images of different aircraft at different viewpoints and real images captured in ground laboratory experiments were used to measure the accuracy and robustness of the pose estimation algorithm
Considering that the vision system was based on two monocular cameras, in the imaging structure features of the aircraft to establish line correspondences for pose estimation
Summary
Aircraft pose estimation is a necessary technology in the field of aeronautical engineering and accurate pose parameters of the aircraft provide the fundamental information needed in many aerospace tasks, such as flight control system testing [1,2,3], auxiliary taking-off and landing [4], collision avoidance and autonomous navigation [5]. Considerable progress has been made in visual sensors and computer vision technologies and a variety of vision-based methods have been developed for estimating the pose of a target. Compared to systems using GPS and IMU, vision systems are relatively inexpensive and can perform rapid pose estimation with the advantage of low power consumption, high flexibility and accuracy [7,8]. In recent years, performing robust and accurate aircraft pose estimation based on visual sensors has been an attractive research topic and remains quite challenging. The visual sensors used for aircraft pose estimation include RGB-D
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