Camera Calibration Method for Autonomous Navigation based on Space Non-cooperative Target Features

Abstract

In the vision-based navigation system, feature-based navigation method for autonomous orbit determination is a newly proposed method. Considering the camera periodic time-varying error caused by the complex on-board environment, a camera calibration method is proposed to compensate for the image point bias and the focal length variation bias combined with augmented unscented Kalman filter. The method can effectively modify the measurements without any other additional equipment except the space non-cooperative target features which extracted from the image shot by the camera. Simulation results indicate that the method can effectively modify the camera measurements and realize autonomous navigation with a higher accuracy compared with no calibration.