On-orbit geometric rectification for micro-satellite based on Lightweight feature database

On-orbit processing is becoming more prevalent due to its ability to efficiently exploit satellite resources. On-orbit geometric rectification improves positioning accuracy for follow-up tasks such as object detection or geometric calibration, while avoiding heavy burden on downlinking bandwidth and time delay. However, existing rectification methods faces some challenges. The hardware resources onboard satellites are restricted, and geographic positioning is often inaccurate. In this article, we propose a novel method designed for on-orbit rectification. The proposed method introduces a two-step registration framework to overcome large initial offsets and also a feature-compressing strategy to reduce the storage space of reference patches. Quantitative and practical experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs well in terms of storage space, time efficiency as well as registration accuracy.