Roll and Pitch Estimation Using Visual Horizon Recognition

In guidance and automated control system, especially for unmanned vehicle, attitude determination is an important element. Generally this parameter is provided by sensors like INS (Inertial Navigation Systems), but it can be also estimated with a single camera that “looks” the horizon. This work presents the project of an embedded solution that uses visual information, captured by a consumer camera, to estimate the vehicle attitude. The system is designed to be mounted on board of a ship or a sail boat, in order to record the roll and pitch angles for safety purpose or to be used for real time application (e.g. during a regatta to overlap the values of the boat attitude with video output coming from a camera mounted on the masthead framing the race field).