STAR DETECTION METHOD FOR STAR SENSOR IMAGES USING RECURSIVE MAXIMUM FILTER

摘要

To autonomously determine the attitude of a spacecraft by a star sensor without a rate sensor, it is necessary to detect and track stars even when the body rate is high. A high body rate causes motion blur and decreases the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the stars, making stable detection of many stars difficult. In a previous paper, we proposed a star detection method using a recursive maximum filter (RMF) to overcome this difficulty . In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the method using actual image sequences taken from an onboard star sensor. The results show that both dim stars with an SNR less than 3 and bright stars with an SNR of 20 in a same image are detected by the method.