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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Villa, Jacopo, McMahon, Jay W., Nesnas, Issa A. D.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02907
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author Villa, Jacopo
McMahon, Jay W.
Nesnas, Issa A. D.
author_facet Villa, Jacopo
McMahon, Jay W.
Nesnas, Issa A. D.
contents We present an algorithm to estimate the rotation pole of a principal-axis rotator using silhouette images collected from multiple camera poses. First, a set of images is stacked to form a single silhouette-stack image, where the object's rotation introduces reflective symmetry about the imaged pole direction. We estimate this projected-pole direction by identifying maximum symmetry in the silhouette stack. To handle unknown center-of-mass image location, we apply the Discrete Fourier Transform to produce the silhouette-stack amplitude spectrum, achieving translation invariance and increased robustness to noise. Second, the 3D pole orientation is estimated by combining two or more projected-pole measurements collected from different camera orientations. We demonstrate degree-level pole estimation accuracy using low-resolution imagery, showing robustness to severe surface shadowing and centroid-based image-registration errors. The proposed approach could be suitable for pole estimation during both the approach phase toward a target object and while hovering.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_02907
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PoleStack: Robust Pole Estimation of Irregular Objects from Silhouette Stacking
Villa, Jacopo
McMahon, Jay W.
Nesnas, Issa A. D.
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
We present an algorithm to estimate the rotation pole of a principal-axis rotator using silhouette images collected from multiple camera poses. First, a set of images is stacked to form a single silhouette-stack image, where the object's rotation introduces reflective symmetry about the imaged pole direction. We estimate this projected-pole direction by identifying maximum symmetry in the silhouette stack. To handle unknown center-of-mass image location, we apply the Discrete Fourier Transform to produce the silhouette-stack amplitude spectrum, achieving translation invariance and increased robustness to noise. Second, the 3D pole orientation is estimated by combining two or more projected-pole measurements collected from different camera orientations. We demonstrate degree-level pole estimation accuracy using low-resolution imagery, showing robustness to severe surface shadowing and centroid-based image-registration errors. The proposed approach could be suitable for pole estimation during both the approach phase toward a target object and while hovering.
title PoleStack: Robust Pole Estimation of Irregular Objects from Silhouette Stacking
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.02907