Optical-and-Radar Image Fusion for Dynamic Estimation of Spin Satellites

As more and more satellites are launched into the space, dynamic estimation of spin satellites has become a critical component of the space situation awareness application. Some explored studies using exterior measurements from different sensors such as optical device and inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) to estimate dynamic parameters of spin satellites. As a single sensor normally provides two-dimensional observation, three-dimensional estimations resulting from these algorithms are strictly related to the prior knowledge of targets characteristics. As a result, it is difficult to expand these methods to other satellites. In order to support the dynamic estimation of most spin satellites, this paper presents a novel dynamic estimation approach which employs synchronized optical-and-radar images. The optical-and-radar fusion strategy has demonstrated its superiority in image analysis field, and breaks down the dynamic estimation of spin satellites into two sub-problems: target attitude estimation and spin parameters estimation. In this work, the proposed algorithm deduces two explicit expressions of target dynamic parameters under the imaging projection model of the joint optical-and-radar observation. Through the particle swarm optimization (PSO), target dynamic parameters are determined in two stages. This paper presents some experiments illustrating the feasibility of the proposed method and subsequent conclusions, which reflect advantages of the joint optical-and-radar observation mode in image interpretation.