Faint target processing (FTP) pipeline for small asteroid probers

Recently the small prober becomes a popular approach for asteroid exploration due to its low cost and high flexibility. Image-aided navigation is an inevitable technology for small asteroid probers as the ground operation is expensive and has long delay. However, the navigation of small probers still faces many challenges. To guarantee the navigation accuracy for future asteroid missions, a novel faint target processing (FTP) pipeline is presented to support the on-board image processing abilities of small probers. The proposed pipeline consists of three steps: pre-processing, fast feature extraction via image restoration and filtering based on fault measurement detection. Simulations are conducted in both Matlab and semi-physical environment. Results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline greatly facilitates extracting features from faint asteroid images and can help achieve good navigation performance. The proposed method can have low computational cost while maintaining good accuracy, and thus have the potential for on-board implementation.