A simple and practical three-dimensional orientation system is presented based on image formation of planar artificial compound eye. The principle of high-precision orientation with artificial compound eye was given and a design method for the three-dimensional orientation system was proposed. Planar camera array was taken as the structure of the imaging system. Sub-cameras ranged to be a square as sub-eyes of the compound eye. Simple and stable optical geometry were produced by camera array and parallel optical axis arranging, which make the results more accurate. Geometric constraints were brought by multiple directional parallaxes. The calculating model was built by multi-directional and selective stereo matching arithmetic to realize high-precision orientation. A nine-camera sample system was fabricated for testing experiments. The positioning accuracy of the experiment is 2.53e-4 rad.