Fast star identification of super large infrared star catalog

For the high-sensitivity cameras of a super-large star catalog, the conventional effective star identification methods for star sensors will face huge storage and calculations that current computers cannot afford. This paper presents a two-stage full-sky star identification method. 3~4 prominent stars are firstly quickly identified from a simplified star catalog, to determine the view direction. Then, three different strategies are adopted to recognize other remaining stars in the field of view: one strategy is to automatically load the K-vector table of the corresponding sky zone; one strategy is to temporarily generate a K-vector table from the candidate star set, and then remaining stars are identified according to the angular distance from the prominent stars; the third strategy is to obtain the image coordinates of the candidate star set, the proximity position constraint is considered while constraining the angular distance from the prominent stars. Experiments show that the speed of the third strategy is increased by about 20% and maintains a higher recognition rate (F1 is about 0.92). This two-stage recognition method ingeniously resolves the huge amount of calculation caused by the super-large star catalog, and can identify enough stars (ten thousand stars) in a single frame, and provides sufficient control points for the subsequent intrinsic calibration.