Research on the application of RANSAC algorithm in electro-optical tracking of space targets

When the electro-optic tracking system is used for space target tracking, it is difficult to extract the target from the field of view occasionally due to the impact of electromagnetic interference, cloud cover or earth shadow etc., and the closed-loop tracking system can barely work in severe cases. At this point the predicted orbit can be used to guide the system to ensure smooth scanning and tracking. In this paper, random sample consensus (RANSAC) algorithm is introduced, which has been widely used in feature extraction in computer vision, to achieve higher prediction accuracy. The loss function of RANSAC algorithm is improved and the WRANSAC algorithm is proposed according to the distribution of observed data, which is used to deal with the limited observation data in real time to track the space target. After the algorithm is adopted, the fault tolerance of observation data is improved and the sensitivity of the model is reduced. The accuracy and robustness of the prediction results are much better than that of the least squares method. The validity of the WRANSAC algorithm is proved by the comparison between the predicted trajectory and the actual trajectory.