Non-cooperative maritime target position and velocity measuring method based on monocular trajectory intersection for video satellite

Abstract

This paper presents a passive measuring method based on monocular trajectory intersection, aimed at realizing the position and velocity measurement of a non-cooperative maritime target for video satellite. Due to the fact that the target’s moving range is relatively small in comparison to that of the satellite during the observation time, a large measuring error results when directly using the monocular trajectory intersection method for 3D motion measurement. Therefore, the dynamic sea surface elevation model is employed to increase the maritime target movement constraints, which simplifies the 3D spatial motion of the target to 2D surface motion. By combining the surface constraint and monocular trajectory intersection method, measurement robustness for a non-cooperative maritime target can be greatly improved. Furthermore, a line-surface intersection method is proposed to obtain the initial solution for motion parameters, which increases the nonlinear optimization efficiency. Simulation experiments are conducted to analyze the effect of different error factors on position and velocity accuracy. The results indicate that the proposed method achieves high measurement accuracy and is feasible in practical applications for video satellite.