Abstract: In lunar exploration, the lunar rover should be recognized by the lunar lander, and the technique of lunar rover recognition from the lunar lander was studied. In order to eliminate the effect of the strong shadow in the lunar illumination condition on the rover recognition, the color segmentation method was used to perform the grey image processing. Based on the comparison of several color image segmentation algorithms, a technique of multichannel color threshold fusion was proposed, and its principle was analyzed by the mode recognition theory of linear classifier. The segmented image was filtered by the morphologic operator and the recognized region was labelled by the label algorithm. The experimental results show that the proposed technique is robust and compatible with the varied illumination, can restrain the background noises, may be used in future lunar exploration. It makes the color segmentation simple and reliable and can also be generalized to common color segmentation application.

Key words: spacecraft structure and design, lunar rover, location, recognition, image segmentation, multichannel color threshold fusion