A Study on Attitude Estimation of UAV Using Image Processing

Abstract

Recently, researchers are actively addressed to utilize Unmanned Aerial Vehicles(UAV) for military and industry applications. One of these applications is to trace the preceding flight when it is necessary to track the route of the suspicious reconnaissance aircraft in secret, and it is necessary to estimate the attitude of the target flight such as Roll, Yaw, and Pitch angles in each instant. In this paper, we propose a method for estimating in real time the attitude of a target aircraft using the video information that is provide by an external camera of a following aircraft. Various image processing methods such as color space division, template matching, and statistical methods such as linear regression were applied to detect and estimate key points and Euler angles. As a result of comparing the X-plane flight data with the estimated flight data through the simulation experiment, it is shown that the proposed method can be an effective method to estimate the flight attitude information of the previous flight.