A crater detection and identification algorithm for autonomous lunar landing

Future space exploration missions and in particular robotic lunar landing missions will require a high-precision autonomous navigation. A key element of the navigation chain is the direct determination of the camera pose in the terrain reference frame by detecting and identifying visual features. For space applications and especially for lunar landing, craters are useful features. A segmentation-based method is introduced to automatically detect craters in an image. Finally, a method to identify the detected craters in a reference database is presented.