An accurate star identification approach based on spectral graph matching for attitude measurement of spacecraft

Star identification is the foundation of star trackers, which are used to precisely determine the attitude of spacecraft. In this paper, we propose a novel star identification approach based on spectral graph matching. In the proposed approach, we construct a feature called the neighbor graph for each main star, transforming the star identification to the problem of finding the most similar neighbor graph. Then the rough search and graph matching are cooperated to form a dynamic search framework to solve the problem. In the rough search stage, the total edge weight in the minimum spanning tree of the neighbor graph is selected as an indicator, then the k-vector range search is applied for reducing the search scale. Spectral graph matching is utilized to achieve global matching, identifying all stars in the neighbor circle with good noise-tolerance ability. Extensive simulation experiments under the position noise, lost-star noise, and fake-star noise show that our approach achieves higher accuracy (mostly over 99%) and better robustness results compared with other baseline algorithms in most cases.