Abstract: This article presents a crater landmark detection and matching method for pinpoint navigation for planetary exploration. Craters are the most notable terrain features with clear outlines in lighting conditions. While taking into consideration the direction of the lighting source, the craters are detected through edge detection, edge clustering of the same crater and ellipse fitting. Based on the geometric invariants of coplanar conics, the voting strategy is used to match the detected craters with the crater database. Besides, a false match and miss match revision strategy is proposed to obtain the crater’s accurate global position. Lunar surface images obtained by Chang’ e-1 are given to show the feasibility of the proposed method.

Key words: planetary landing, optical navigation, crater landmark, crater detection, crater matching