Omnidirectional vision on UAV for attitude computation

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are the subject of an increasing interest in many applications. Autonomy is one of the major advantages of these vehicles. It is then necessary to develop particular sensors in order to provide efficient navigation functions. In this paper, we propose a method for attitude computation catadioptric images. We first demonstrate the advantages of the catadioptric vision sensor for this application. In fact, the geometric properties of the sensor permit to compute easily the roll and pitch angles. The method consists in separating the sky from the earth in order to detect the horizon. We propose an adaptation of the Markov Random Fields for catadioptric images for this segmentation. The second step consists in estimating the parameters of the horizon line thanks to a robust estimation algorithm. We also present the angle estimation algorithm and finally, we show experimental results on synthetic and real images captured from an airplane.