Comparison of Optical Flow-Based Linear Angular Rate Estimation Methods Considering Real Flight Data

The angular velocities of an observer moving through an arbitrary scene can be obtained solely from mono camera image sequences, utilizing the optical flow. A major obstacle in this approach is that, the optical flow is non linearly related to the 3-D motion parameters. In this work three possible linear methods are presented to solve this nonlinear equation and then these methods are evaluated and compared using real mono camera images and real sensor measurements collected during two test flights.