Pose measurement of high-speed moving object based on unsynchronized image sequences from moving platforms

• Cross-platform compatibility, support for unsynchronized cameras with different pfs. • Correspondence-free automatic calibration for moving platforms. • First method for orientation measurement under unsynchronized and partially imaging based on orthogonality constraint. This paper proposes a novel vision-based framework for pose measurement of high-speed moving object using unsynchronized image sequences captured from independently moving platforms. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach capable of achieving robust pose estimation under such unsynchronized, moving platform, and correspondence-free conditions. The proposed method introduces three key innovations. First, we develop a correspondence-free automatic calibration technique that enables each moving platform to measure its pose without requiring pre-established feature matches, thereby supporting flexible deployment in unstructured environments. Second, we formulate the object’s spatial trajectory by constructing a virtual parametric plane shared across platforms through virtual plane-plane geometric constraints; the object’s position at each time instant is constrained to a spatial line, and the trajectory is recovered by minimizing the orthogonal distances between all such lines. Third, leveraging the physical prior that the orientation of a high-speed cylindrical object remains constant during flight, we propose a novel orthogonality constraint: the object’s axis is perpendicular to the normal vector of its tangent plane, which is extracted from contour geometry in unsynchronized images, and enables orientation recovery even under unsynchronized and partially imaging. Experiments on both synthetic data and real images demonstrate that our method achieves accuracy and numerical stability comparable to state-of-the-art methods, while offering unique practical advantages: cross-platform compatibility, support for different camera frame rates, wide-field mobile measurement capability, and complete independence from inter-platform synchronization or prior calibration.