A new approach for the estimation of non-cooperative satellites based on circular feature extraction

Abstract Pose estimation of non-cooperative satellites has been a hot topic in the study of astronautics as the visual feedback will highly enhance the safety of on-orbit services. A stereo vision system is proposed in this paper. It works as an eye-to-hand vision camera in the final approach phase Based on circular feature extraction, a closed-form solution is presented. The position and orientation of the adapter ring can be figured out in real-time as well as the unknown radius. Neither additional sensors nor prior knowledge is required, and the orientation-duality problem has been solved. It works well on the partial ellipses and is robust to outliers, noise and occlusions. Experimental results on both synthetic and real images have demonstrated the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.