Approach for recognizing and tracking beacon in inter-satellite optical communication based on optical flow method.

In inter-satellite laser communication systems, accurate positioning of the beacon is essential for establishing a steady laser communication link. For inter-satellite optical communication, the main factor affecting the acquisition and tracking of the beacon is the background noise, such as stellar background light. In this study, we considered the effect of the background noise on a beacon in inter-satellite optical communication and proposed a new recognition algorithm for the beacon, which uses the optical flow vector obtained from the image data. We verified the feasibility of this method by performing simulation analysis and experiments. Both simulation and experiments showed that the new algorithm could accurately obtain the position of the centroid of the beacon under the effect of the background light. Furthermore, considering the identification probability of a light spot through the background light, the locating accuracy of the new algorithm was higher than that of the conventional gray centroid algorithm. Therefore, this new approach would be beneficial for the design of satellite-to-ground optical communication systems.