Distributed Parallel Super-Block-Based Star Detection and Centroid Calculation

Due to the inadequacies of the speed of star detection and centroid calculation (SDCC), the applications of high-resolution and high-frame-rate image sensors are greatly limited in star trackers, restricting the performance of the star trackers. To resolve this problem, a novel distributed parallel super-block-based SDCC method is proposed in this paper. In contrast to the previous SDCC methods, the proposed method divides the star images into several sub-images and processes these sub-images in parallel. Then, by using a super-block-based method and a distributed shared memory-based method to process the stars in sub-images (sub-stars) and in adjacent sub-images (boundary stars), respectively, the position information of all the stars are detected during the parallel scan of the sub-images. The proposed method exhibits a speed that is up to $4 \,\, \times $ M times faster than the previous SDCC methods in processing the star images that are divided into M sub-images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method is correct and effective. It is applicable to the use of most high-performance image sensors and resolves the performance limitation of star trackers to achieve better attitude accuracy and attitude update rate.

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