A star pattern recognition algorithm for satellite attitude determination

To determine the satellite attitude in space, various attitude sensors are used. Among them, the most accurate sensor is the star tracker. In this paper, a novel star pattern recognition algorithm in the “lost in space” mode is presented. The proposed method improves the searching speed by arranging the large star catalogue using a search tree data structure. To further improve the processing speed, the star image is processed at the grid level instead of pixel level. The results from the study demonstrate that the proposed approach has significantly reduced the average run-time by 50% as compared to the conventional methods while still achieve slightly better star recognition accuracy at 95.07%.