An Off-Board Vision System for Relative Attitude Measurement of Aircraft
Fulin Liu, Zhenzhong Wei, Guangjun Zhang
Abstract
Aircraft attitude has always been an important technical parameter during flights, especially for stages such as aircraft take-off and landing. This article presents a monocular off-board vision system for relative attitude measurement of fixed-wing aircraft. In this system, a zoom imaging subsystem is set up to track and shoot the aircraft over a large distance range. Image sequences and corresponding servo data are transmitted to the processing computer for vision algorithms. A model-based attitude tracking algorithm, which requires the computer-aided design model of the aircraft, is performed to measure the relative attitude of the aircraft with respect to the reference platform. A 2-D visual tracking algorithm and a target detection algorithm are also employed to control the vision system. The proposed attitude tracking algorithm achieves competitive results on a publicly available dataset. The full system is validated in a real-flight experiment. The results revealed that the proposed system can run in real time on 1920×1080@40 Hz videos with an accuracy better than 0.5 <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^\circ$</tex-math></inline-formula> .