A REAL-TIME MODEL-BASED METHOD FOR 3-D OBJECT ORIENTATION ESTIMATION IN OUTDOOR SCENES

This letter presents a new method for real-time determination of the t hree-dimensional (3-D) orientation, i.e., the rotation angle with resp ect to one of the principal object axes, of a moving known object from a monocular image sequence, The method is composed by three steps: 1) extraction of the morphological skeleton from binary images, 2) proje ction of the skeleton function on two planes and its analytical approx imation by nonuniform rational B-splines, and 3) comparison with a set of data stored into a model. database, Several experiments per-formed on real images prove the method's validity.