Robust Attitude Estimation with Catadioptric Vision

Attitude (roll and pitch) is an essential data for the navigation of a UAV. Rather than using inertial sensors, we propose a catadioptric vision system allowing a fast, robust and accurate estimation of these angles. We show that the optimization of a sky/ground partitioning criterion associated with the specific geometric characteristics of the catadioptric sensor provides very interesting results. Experimental results obtained on real sequences are presented and compared with inertial sensor measures