An AUTONOMOUS STAR IDENTIFICATION ALGORITHM BASED ON THE DIRECTED CIRCULARITY PATTERN

Abstract. The accuracy of the angular distance may decrease due to lots of factors, such as the parameters of the stellar camera aren't calibrated on-orbit, or the location accuracy of the star image points is low, and so on, which can cause the low success rates of star identification. A robust directed circularity pattern algorithm is proposed in this paper, which is developed on basis of the matching probability algorithm. The improved algorithm retains the matching probability strategy to identify master star, and constructs a directed circularity pattern with the adjacent stars for unitary matching. The candidate matching group which has the longest chain will be selected as the final result. Simulation experiments indicate that the improved algorithm has high successful identification and reliability etc, compared with the original algorithm. The experiments with real data are used to verify it.