Autonomous identification of debris' impact craters utilizing range image sequence

In this study, a new approach to autonomously detecting areal distribution of the small debris' impact craters on the surface of spacecraft is proposed. The proposed method is implemented by utilizing a series of the range images captured with 2D scanning range sensor in a stationary motion. In order to precisely extract the spherical pitted areas on the planar surfaces, some invariant parameters with 3D curvatures are utilized, and the range sensor's motion parameters are estimated from the flow data appearing in the range image sequence. The validity of the proposed method is checked through some fundamental experiments by using synthetic and real range image sequences.