A satellite solar panel support detection algorithm based on region growing Hough transform

To accomplish the real-time detection of satellite solar panel support when the Tethered Space Robot (TSR) captures non-cooperative target satellite, a novel Hough transform based on the thought of Region Growth Algorithm is proposed. The Region Growth Algorithm is employed to enlarge the boundary of the set pixels; after the detection of the every single pixel in the growing region using Hough transform, the searching boundary of the new set pixels is gradually reduced so that the amount of calculation is decreased. In addition, the limit of angle range and the dynamic clustering method solve the problem of excessive linear detection as well as the intersection point detection of Hough transform. The experiment results and their analysis show preliminarily that the proposed method can detect accurately with less computational time, and can also solve the problem of Hough transform that one line may be detected for several times. Each result can satisfy the requirement of TSR on-orbit grasp task.