A Curvature-Based Multidirectional Local Contrast Method for Star Detection of a Star Sensor

Stray light, such as sunlight, moonlight, and earth-atmosphere light, can bring about light spots in backgrounds, and it affects the star detection of star sensors. To overcome this problem, this paper proposes a star detection algorithm (CMLCM) with multidirectional local contrast based on curvature. It regards the star image as a spatial surface and analyzes the difference in the curvature between the star and the background. It uses a facet model to represent the curvature and calculate the second-order derivatives in four directions. According to the characteristic of the star and the complex background, it enhances the target and suppresses the complex background by a new calculation method of a local contrast map. Finally, it divides the local contrast map into multiple 256 × 256 sub-regions for a more effective threshold segmentation. The experimental results indicated that the CMLCM algorithm could effectively detect a large number of accurate stars under stray light interference, and the detection rate was higher than other compared algorithms with a lower false alarm rate.

The influence of color temperature mismatch in star simulator on positioning accuracy and magnitude measurement by star sensor

During the calibrating of star sensor, the calibration accuracy is greatly affected by the mismatch between the color temperature of the light and the to-be-measured star, which further affects the attitude measurement accuracy. This paper studied the near-infrared spectra of stars with different color temperatures, and analyzed the errors on star positioning and magnitude measurement of star sensor due to the color temperature mismatch. The results showed that in the central field of view, the spot centroid deviation caused by spectral mismatch is smaller than that in the edge field of view.And the defocus of the imaging surface also affects the spot centroid deviation. Besides, when calibrating with 6000K color temperature light, the maximum measurement error can reach -1.9126 magnitude.