Visual detection and 3D model-based tracking for landing on an aircraft carrier

A challenging task of airborne operations remains the landing on the carrier deck, which limits the carrier operational efficiency during rough sea. In this paper, a method of carrier visual detection and tracking is described. With the help of the aircraft sensors, the carrier is first detected in the image using a warped patch of a reference image. This provides an initialization to a real time 3D model-based tracker estimating the camera pose during the sequence. This method is demonstrated and evaluated using a simulator with high-fidelity visualization and on real video.