Attitude Estimation from Polarimetric Cameras

Abstract

In the robotic field, navigation and path planning applications benefit from a wide range of visual systems (e.g, perspective cameras, depth cameras, catadioptric cameras, etc.). In outdoor conditions, these systems capture information in which sky regions cover a major segment of the images acquired. However, sky regions are discarded and are not considered as visual cue in vision applications. In this paper, we propose to estimate attitude of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) from sky information using a polarimetric camera. Theoretically, we provide a framework estimating the attitude from the skylight polarized patterns. We showcase this formulation on both simulated and real-word data sets which proved the benefit of using polarimetric sensors along with other visual sensors in robotic applications.