Planetary Center Location Algorithm for Spacecraft Autonomous Optical Navigation

With the development of aerospace technology, optical navigation based on planetary image processing has become increasingly important. Traditional approaches in image processing are mainly restricted to the capture phase. Meanwhile, they are susceptible to texture-rich features such as the celestial twilight line. Accordingly, new techniques are required for spacecraft to perform missions safely. To this end, a new image processing algorithm capable of independently extracting the planetary center location from an incomplete texture-rich target celestial image with high precision is presented here. First, the image is smoothed using the Gaussian-adaptive median filter, and the improved Otsu algorithm is employed to detect the weak edge. Second, a texture suppression algorithm based on the 2nd-order feature edge is proposed. Finally, the planet's center coordinates are calculated by fitting the circular arc edges. It is indicated that the proposed algorithm is resistant to fake edges and could extract navigation information from texture-rich planetary images. Moreover, the proposed algorithm exhibits a high detection ratio of up to 92%.

Automated summary

With the development of aerospace technology, optical navigation based on planetary image processing has become increasingly important. Traditional image processing approaches are limited to the capture phase and are susceptible to texture-rich features such as the celestial twilight line. In this paper, a new image processing algorithm is proposed to independently extract the planetary center location from an incomplete texture-rich celestial image with high precision.