The 6D Pose Estimation of the Aircraft Using Geometric Property

Abstract

The take-off and landing activities of aircraft must operate daily in a safe and orderly manner to provide a safe and efficient transition of passengers and goods. The 6D pose estimation of the aircraft is the key to guaranteeing the safe take-off and landing of the aircraft. The vision-based 6D pose estimation method, an important method when GPS and gyroscope are unavailable, faces the problem of poor estimation accuracy due to large scenes and large depths. An end-to-end 6D pose estimation method of the aircraft is proposed to solve this problem. Firstly, this paper combines the rigid structure characteristic of the aircraft with the direction property of arrows to build an aircraft 3D skeleton with reconstruction ability, simplicity, and direction properties. Secondly, this paper reconstructs the predesigned 3D skeleton of the aircraft from an RGB image and explores the 6D pose information in the reconstructed 3D skeleton. A 3D matrix is used to show the 3D skeleton and improve the encoding of the spatial information in the 3D skeleton. The experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms Wide-Depth-Range by 199% and 105% on the metric ADD and Rete, respectively. Compared with YOLO6D, the proposed method is 58.9% faster.