Landing site assessment and probe motion estimation based on image

This paper proposes a probe motion estimation and landing sites assessment algorithm. Due to the planar surface of landing site, the motion estimation algorithm based on essential matrix is instability. Motion Estimation algorithm from Homography is employed to fix this problem. Homography matrix is calculated by least squares method whit tracking at least 4 feature points through images. To calculate the motion of probe, the distance between probe and surface is also obtained by laser altimeter. The Landing Site is detected by the mean square error of the image intensity. Adding the motion of probe the algorithm determines the gradient of the site. The results of monte carlo simulation show that the proposed algorithm can select the landing site accurately, moreover it can provide the motion estimation of probe with translation estimation relative error under 10% and rotation estimation error under 0.23°.