A modified star map identification method suitable for astronomical camera

High accuracy star map identification results are the basis of astronomical positioning. The traditional triangle star identification algorithm has a higher redundancy and a poor robustness to noise. Considering the specific requirements of the star map identification of the astronomical camera, in allusion to this default, proceeding with selection of guide stars, construction of guide star catalogue and realization of matching algorithm, a modified triangle algorithm based on traditional one is presented. With the proposed algorithm, the guide star is selected from astronomical durchmusterung. In order to speed up guide star indexing, the guide star catalogue is founded after dividing the sky using the overlapping rectangle method. The guide star sub-catalogue is constructed by the radius of guide triangle circumcircle and the two sides of guide triangle. The characteristic radius is used for indexing and sorted in an ascending order to improve the searching efficiency in the processing of star map identification. The matching scope of the angular distance is narrowed and the matching rate of angular distance is improved by the matching of the characteristics radius. If there exists redundancy, a normalized magnitude is used to eliminate it. Within the observing area of the real sky, the 1050 star maps continuously are calculated. The simulation results show that, the identification rate of this algorithm is greater than 97. 83% when the noise of position error is two pixels, and the average identification time is about 25. 07ms. Compared with the traditional triangle algorithm, this modified algorithm has a couple of advantages, including the smaller storage capacity of guide star catalogue, better robustness to position and magnitude error, higher rate of correcting star map identification and lower redundancy.