3-D small body model reconstruction and spacecraft motion estimation during fly-around

In order to reconstruct a 3D small body model and estimate the spacecraft pose during fly-around the small body, a method based on an image sequence is proposed. Scale-invariant feature points from the image sequence are extracted and matched by PCA-SIFT algorithm. As the images are taken by narrow angle camera, image formation model can be simplified by a weak perspective projection transform, and then the 3D small body model and the spacecraft position and attitude can be recovered by using SVD factorization algorithm. Real images and synthetic data are used to analyze recovery error affected by distance, number of feature points, image frames and field angle etc. Simulation results show that this method can be used for reconstruction of the 3D small body model and the spacecraft motion estimation effectively.