Removing dust impact for visual navigation in Mars landing

Visual navigation has received more and more attention in Mars landing. However, dust devils are active on Mars. The dust will make a great influence on visual navigation during the landing phase. In this paper, a simple but effective approach was proposed to remove the dust impact for visual navigation in Mars landing. This method was based on a model which was widely used to describe the scene radiance that was affected by different weather conditions. First the calculation method of transmission parameter was deduced from this model. Then the value of the global atmospheric light was estimated through the detection of most dust-opaque region. After all unknown variables were determined, the clear image was recovered by the corresponding formula and calculation method. For it is difficult to obtain the decent images that appear while the Mars rover enters the landing phase, a simulated dust environment was created in the lab and some images affected by dust were obtained to check the validity of this method. From the results of the experiments, the proposed approach can effectively eliminate the dust influences and provide clearer pictures. The clear images help to provide more precise data for visual navigation.