AN ALGORITHM OF MOTION ESTIMATION BASED ON UNIT QUATERNION DECOMPOSITION OF THE ROTATION MATRIX

Based on the unit quaternion decomposition of rotation matrix, this paper puts forward an algorithm to estimate motion parameters from the space position vectors of 3D feature points. Rotation matrix’s representation with the unit quaternion has no singular points, so the unit quaternion-based estimation method is of more practical importance, and the algorithm in this paper does not need iteration computation compared to those unit quaternion-based methods proposed by Horn(1987) and Su, et al.(1989). Solution’s uniqueness analysis of the algorithm and simulation experiment results are also presented, it can be seen that performance of our method is satisfactory.