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Fast star centroid extraction algorithm with sub-pixel accuracy based on FPGA

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Abstract

Spacecraft’s attitude information plays an important role in celestial navigation. The attitude is mainly determined by matching the star’s centroid in the obtained image with its corresponding information in star catalog. Generally, the star image can be regarded as a spot with a diameter <5 pixels. Therefore, it is very difficult to extract the star centroid with sub-pixel accuracy, especially in the hardware system, such as FPGAs. The existing spot centroid extraction methods with high accuracy require plenty of pixels to realize the complex computations. Limited to the star’s diameter and hardware requirements, such methods are not suitable for star centroid extraction in hardware system. To solve the problem, a two-step extraction method for star centroid with sub-pixel accuracy is proposed. The maximum pixel-level center can be located through zero crossing of the first derivative in a small region. Taking the pixel-level center as the middle of the window with fixed size, the sub-pixel offsets to the sub-pixel center can be calculated using fixed window weighted centroid method. The sub-pixel center of the star is then obtained by adding the offsets to the pixel-level center. This method can be implemented in hardware to increase processing speed, using Verilog hardware description languages. A simulation is performed on computer and FPGA. Experimental results show the excellent performance in accuracy and processing speed of two-step method. In addition, two-step method has strong ability of resisting noise and good robustness compared to other methods.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 61372177), the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (No. 20101102110033).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Precision Opto-mechatronics Technology, Ministry of Education, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Fuqiang Zhou, Jingxin Zhao, Tao Ye & Lipeng Chen

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  1. Fuqiang Zhou
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  2. Jingxin Zhao
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  3. Tao Ye
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Correspondence to Fuqiang Zhou.

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Zhou, F., Zhao, J., Ye, T. et al. Fast star centroid extraction algorithm with sub-pixel accuracy based on FPGA. J Real-Time Image Proc 12, 613–622 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-014-0408-z

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