A new approach for measurement of pitch, roll and yaw angles based on a circular feature

Abstract

This paper presents a simple, yet very effective approach to measure the three types of rotation angles by the method of imaging analysis. This approach is suitable for many actual applications, such as head pose tracking, vehicle monitoring, robotic operation, etc. In this paper, a circular feature is fixed on the object, which can do the rotational motion. By measuring the rotational angles of the circular feature based on perspective projection, we can obtain the object’s rotational angles. We deduce the computation methods of the pure pitch, roll and yaw angles. Then we propose the methods of computing the pitch, roll and yaw angles in complex situations, which are different from the computation methods of pure pitch, roll and yaw angles. Based on the approach proposed in this paper, some experiments are conducted and the results show that the approach can achieve good performance when the rotation angles are in the scope of ±90°.