An Off-Board Vision System for Relative Attitude Measurement of Aircraft

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
$^\circ$
.