A Vision Based Method for Aircraft Approach Angle Estimation
Haijiang Zhu · Journal of Software · 2006
An algorithm for estimating aircraft approach angle using computer vision is proposed in this paper. During the landing of an aircraft, the descent of the aircraft may be approximately considered as a pure translation motion. In this case the epipole has the same coordinates in all images and is called the Focus-of-Expansion (FOE), and the vanishing line of the ground plane is termed the Horizon. Furthermore, how the Focus-of-Expansion and the Horizon are extracted from a few calibrated sequential images is first introduced, then the aircraft approach angle is derived from these parameters. Simulated and real experiments validate this algorithm.