Fast Star Matching Method Based on Double K-Vector Lookup Tables for Multi-Exposure Star Trackers

A high update rate is always one of the vital indices of star trackers. By recording star positions at N moments within a single star image, the multi-exposure imaging approach (MEIA) proposed in an earlier study can improve the attitude update rate of star trackers by N times. Unfortunately, when the existing star matching method is adopted to match the observed and predicted stars in MEIA, the matching time is significantly increased with the increase in multi-exposure times, N, or the number of navigation stars, M, which sharply affects the MEIA’s performance. Therefore, a fast star matching method based on double K-vector lookup tables (DKVLUTs) is proposed to address the above issue. In this method, the information of all predicted stars is used to establish the DKVLUT, and thus, the speed of the whole matching process between observed and predicted stars would be increased effectively by means of the DKVLUT. Both simulations and experiments are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed method. The results both show that the matching time of the proposed method is reduced by nearly one order of magnitude compared with that of the existing method, which demonstrates the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.