Towards accurate spacecraft self-location estimation by elimi- nating close craters in camera-shot image

This paper focuses on our previous method, Triangle Similarity Matching (TSM), as the conventional method, proposes the method for improving an accuracy of a spacecraft self-location estimation by eliminating the close craters in the camera-shot image, and aims at investigating its effectiveness through the experiment. The proposed method contributes to preventing from wrongly estimating the spacecraft location when two or more craters are close to each other, where the wrong crater may be selected instead of the correct crater. The experiment on the test-case employed in the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon (SLIM) mission have revealed that (1) the estimation accuracy of TSM with the proposed method is better than that of the conventional TSM and (2) TSM with the proposed method was robust to both the images with noise and those with many shadows.