As the location of the wheel center is the key to accurately measuring the wheelbase, the wheelbase difference and the wheel static radius, a high-precision wheel center detection method based on stereo vision is proposed. First, according to the prior information, the contour of the wheel hub is extracted and fitted as an ellipse curve, and the ellipse fitting equation can be obtained. Then, a new un-tangent constraint is adopted to improve the ellipse matching precision. Finally, the 3D coordinates of the wheel center can be reconstructed by the spatial circle projection algorithm with low time complexity and high measurement accuracy. Simulation experiments verify that compared with the ellipse center reconstruction algorithm and the planar constraint optimization algorithm, the proposed method can acquire the 3D coordinates of the spatial circle more exactly. Furthermore, the measurements of the wheelbase, the wheelbase difference and the wheel static radius for three types of vehicles demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method for wheel center detection.
