Particle filter-based relative rolling estimation algorithm for non-cooperative infrared spacecraft

The issue of feature point mismatching among infrared image sequence would bring big challenge to estimating the relative motion of non-cooperative spacecraft for it couldn’t provide the prior knowledge about its geometric structure and motion pattern. The paper introduces particle filter to precisely match the feature points within a desired region predicted by a kinetic equation, and presents a least square estimation-based algorithm to measure the relative rolling motion of non-cooperative spacecraft. The state transition equation and the measurement update equation of non-cooperative spacecraft are represented by establishing its kinetic equations, and then the relative pose measurement is converted to the maximum posteriori probability estimation via assuming the uncertainties about geometric structure and motion pattern as random and time-varying variables. These uncertainties would be interpreted and even solved through continuously measuring the image feature points of the rotating non-cooperative infrared spacecraft. Subsequently, the feature point is matched within a predicted region among sequence infrared image using particle filter algorithm to overcome the position estimation noise caused by the uncertainties of geometric structure and motion pattern. Finally, the position parameters including rotation motion are estimated by means of solving the minimum error of feature point mismatching using least square estimate theory. Both simulated and real infrared image sequences are induced in the experiment to evaluate the performance of the relative rolling estimation, and the experimental data show that the rolling motion estimated by the proposed algorithm is more robust to the feature extraction noise and various rotation speed. Meanwhile, the relative rolling estimation error would increase dramatically with distance and rotation speed increasing.