Rotation Angle Measurement of High-speed Flying Object

This paper describes how to measure the rotation angle of a high-speed flying object in 3D space. As the flying object, we consider a golf ball just after impact, whose speed ranges from 40 m/s to 80 m/s. As the sensing device, we employed a high-speed one-line CCD camera instead of employing multiple synchronized 2D image sensors. On the equator and on its perpendicular great circle, black markers are painted to identify rotation angle. The line sensor captures the golf ball and markers when the ball passes through the image capturing plane. From the image, we estimate the rotation angle of the ball. The quaternion approach is used to estimate the rotation angle instead of the Euler angle expression to avoid the gimbal lock phenomenon. Simulations and experiments were carried out to show the validity of the method, and reasonable results were obtained