A scene matching method for automatic and precise soft landing on the lunar surface

In order to improve the accuracy of autonomous soft landing on the lunar surface, a multi-model hierarchical scene matching method based on scale theory is proposed, using the images taken by the lunar orbiter and lander as the information sources. The FAST keypoint extracting technique is used in scale space of the lunar surface image, and then the exact scale, location and orientation of the keypoints are decided. A patch pair sampling pattern around the keypointis is introduced to build the binary descriptor with comparisons of patch pairs. Matching two descriptors is a simple computation of their Hamming distance. Experiments indicate that, with its robustness to scale changes, rotation, motion blur and various illumination conditions, the proposed method could well fulfill the real-time landing target recognition and tracking needs of automatic and precise soft landing on the lunar surface.