Detection of the Position and the Size of Craters using Principal Component Analysis and its Evaluations

Abstract

SLIM project which aim for pinpoint landing on the moon surface. For achieving this plan, it is necessary to estimate the flight position of the space probe. The estimation is performed by matching the detected craters with database. This paper introduces a crater detection method using Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and its evaluation. This method is capable of real-time processing under low computational resources such as Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). In this research, we report improvement of robustness at detection and high accuracy of crater size measurement.