Combined line-of-sight inertial stabilization and visual tracking: application to an airborne camera platform

The paper describes a novel pointing & tracking feedback algorithm for an inertially stabilized double gimbal airborne camera system equipped with a computer vision system. The key idea is to enhance the intuitive decoupled controller structure its optical axis. The resulting controller can also compensate for the apparent translation between the camera and the observed object, but then the velocity of this mutual translational motion must be measured or estimated. The proposed algorithm turns out to be more insensitive to longer sampling periods of the computer vision system.