A Rotation-Invariant Additive Vector Sequence Based Star Pattern Recognition

A novel star pattern recognition technique for a “Lost-in-space” mode star tracker is presented in this paper. First, the two-dimensional (2-D) vectors connecting the stars are constructed in a rotation-invariant frame. Later, the additive property of 2-D vectors is integrated with the rotation-invariant frame to build a vector sequence for star identification. The proposed technique achieves an identification accuracy of 98.7% and has a run-time of only 12 ms for real-time testing on star images.