Image processing for autonomous rendezvous in the OLEV mission

In this paper are described the image processing methods to be used by the OLEV mission during autonomous rendezvous operations. OLEV is a commercial mission aimed to extend the operational life of geostationary telecommunication satellites by supplying them control, navigation and guidance services. The OLEV satellite is brought to the vicinity (∼2 km) of the client satellite by application of dedicated ground tracking techniques. At that point, the imaging system is activated, providing to the control system angular position and distance to the client satellite during the rendezvous operation. The images provided by the active rendezvous camera are transmitted to ground, where they are processed to detect and track the client satellite shape, extracting angular position and distance information. Shape detection is performed using novel morphological gray-scale reconstruction filters and automatic image thresholding techniques.