An asteroid landing location algorithm based on image feature

Optical navigation technology is widely used in precision guidance for autonomous landing and hazard avoidance. According to the requirements of the computer vision landing location system on a planetary lander, this paper proposed an algorithm to automatically obtain the precise landing position, which is based on optical image features. The main contents of this paper are as follows: Firstly, an integrated corner detection algorithm is firstly applied to detect the interest corners on asteroid images, which performs quite well compared with other feature extraction methods in many aspects; Secondly, the paper introduces a mutual matching method based on moment invariant and regional feature mutual information; Finally, the landing position can be established by calculating the vectors between the goal landing point and the feature points obtained on the base image and correctly matching the feature point pairs on the base image with images captured by CCD camera in real time when landing on the asteroid. The simulated experiments have been conducted using Eros Asteroid images. The results show that the algorithm can achieve high matching accuracy and is qualified for engineering application.