A new approach based on crater detection and matching for visual navigation in planetary landing

This paper provides an approach of crater detection and matching to visual navigation in planetary landing missions. The approach aims to detect craters on the planetary surface and match them to a landmark database during the descent phase of a planetary landing mission. Firstly an image region pairing method is proposed to detect the crater by using an image region feature detector. Then a WTA-rule is adopted to match the detected crater to the crater in database. To further reduce the false matching rate, an efficient method for reducing false matches using parameters of crater in 3-D database is proposed. Real images of planetary terrain and a semi-physical planetary landing simulation platform are utilized to test the performance of the approach, simulation results show the proposed approach is able to match the required number of craters to the database for pin-point planetary landing with a low rate of false detection and false matching, which will lead to an improved planetary landing precision.