An attitude estimation method for MAV based on the detection of vanishing point

For Micro Aerial vehicles (MAV) flying low in the city, an attitude estimation method based on machine vision is presented. First, the method detects the straight edge lines using Hough transform from the downward looking images captured. Then, a voting scheme that uses pixels as accumulators is applied to simultaneously evaluate the vertical edge lines of buildings and the vanishing point at which they converge. Finally, the attitude of UAV is calculated according to single view geometry. The experiment results indicate that the method detects the vanishing point reliably, and estimate the attitude precisely.