Robust Perspective-n-Crater for Crater-based Camera Pose Estimation

Lunar survey missions require accurate estimation of satellite and/or sensor pose (position and attitude) to achieve precise surface measurement. Crater-based pose estimation (CBPE) holds promise to achieve the desired accuracy. However, current pose estimation methods suffer from one or more weaknesses, such as loose coupling of position and attitude optimisation, not accounting for wrong crater matches, and using geometrically invalid objective functions for estimation. To conclusively address these drawbacks, we develop a robust perspective-n-crater pose estimation method that employs geometrically meaningful and information-rich elliptical representation of craters, in combination with M-estimators to account for incorrect crater identifications. To enable evaluation, we construct an extensive labelled dataset of synthetic lunar images taken under diverse conditions over the Moon’s surface. Results on the dataset demonstrate that our work addresses the drawbacks of previous methods and raises the achievable accuracy of CBPE. As another contribution, we will also release our dataset to stimulate further research.