Determining the Fixed Pattern Noise of a CMOS Sensor: Improving the Sensibility of Autonomous Star Trackers

Pereira, Eduardo dos Santos

doi:10.5028/jatm.v5i2.206

ABSTRACT:

Autonomous star trackers are optical-electronic devices used for attitude determination of artificial satellites, having as a reference for this computation the positions of stars. There is one autonomous star tracker in development at the Aerospace Electronics Division of the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research. The autonomous star tracker imager is a complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor active pixel sensor, consisting of an integrated circuit with an array of them. Each pixel has a photodetector and an active amplifier. Since it has many amplifiers, the active pixel sensor has an additional fixed pattern noise, therefore its characterization is different from the traditional method used for the charge coupled devices. With this experiment, it was observed that the mean value per columns of fixed pattern noise is ~100% greater than the mean value of the pixel one. Taking into account this result, modeling the pixel fixed pattern noise will not be important to improve the autonomous star tracker sensibility. Furthermore, the random noise value was less than 1% of the fixed pattern noise range data, being possible to estimate it. In this work, we presented the fixed pattern noise new parametric model, which has a good agreement when compared with the experimental data. It was calculated Pearson’s product-moment correlation coefficient between the model and the observed data, in order to quantify the model accuracy and it was obtained 99% for flat field and 79% for dark current.

KEYWORDS:
Star trackers; Aerospace systems; Attitude determination; Spacecraft; Applied astronomy

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REFERENCES

Bigas, M., Cabruja, E., Forest, J., Salvi, J., 2006, “Review of CMOS image sensors”, Microelectronics Journal, Vol. 37, pp. 433-451.
Gamal, A.E., Fowler, B., Min, H., Liu, X., 1998, “Modeling and estimation of FPN components in CMOS image sensors”, International Society for Optics and Photonics, Vol. 3301, pp. 168-177.
Liebe, C.C., 1995, “Star trackers for attitude determination”, Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Vol. 10, pp. 10-16.
Liu, H.B., Wang, J., Tan, J., Yang, J., Jia, H., Li, X., 2011, “Autonomous on-orbit calibration of a star tracker camera”, Optical Engineering, Vol. 50, pp. 023604.
Pillman, B., Guidash, R., Kelly, S., 2006, “Fixed pattern noise removal in CMOS imagers across various operational conditions”, US Patent 7,092,017.
Press, W.H., Teukolsky, S.A., Vetterling, W.T., Flannery, B.P., 1993, “Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN; The Art of Scientific Computing”, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA, 973 p.
Schöberl, M., Senel, C., Fößel, S., Bloss, H., Kaup, A., 2009. “Nonlinear Dark Current Fixed Pattern Noise Compensation for Variable Frame Rate Moving Picture Cameras”, 17th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Vol. 1, Glasgow, Scotland, pp. 268-272.
Wahba, G., 1965, “A least squares estimate of satellite attitude”, SIAM Review, Vol. 7, pp. 409-409.
Xing, F., Dong, Y., You, Z., 2006, “Laboratory calibration of star tracker with brightness independent star identification strategy”, Optical Engineering , Vol. 45, pp. 063604-063604-9.
Zenick, R., 2003, “Lightweight, low-power coarse star tracker”, Proceedings of the AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites, Mission Lessons, SSC03-X-7, Vol. 1, Logan, Utah, pp. 01-14.

Publication Dates

Publication in this collection
Apr-Jun 2013

History

Received
30 Nov 2012
Accepted
25 Mar 2013

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

[1] Bigas, M., Cabruja, E., Forest, J., Salvi, J., 2006, “Review of CMOS image sensors”, Microelectronics Journal, Vol. 37, pp. 433-451.

[2] Gamal, A.E., Fowler, B., Min, H., Liu, X., 1998, “Modeling and estimation of FPN components in CMOS image sensors”, International Society for Optics and Photonics, Vol. 3301, pp. 168-177.

[3] Liebe, C.C., 1995, “Star trackers for attitude determination”, Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine, Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Vol. 10, pp. 10-16.

[4] Liu, H.B., Wang, J., Tan, J., Yang, J., Jia, H., Li, X., 2011, “Autonomous on-orbit calibration of a star tracker camera”, Optical Engineering, Vol. 50, pp. 023604.

[5] Pillman, B., Guidash, R., Kelly, S., 2006, “Fixed pattern noise removal in CMOS imagers across various operational conditions”, US Patent 7,092,017.

[6] Press, W.H., Teukolsky, S.A., Vetterling, W.T., Flannery, B.P., 1993, “Numerical Recipes in FORTRAN; The Art of Scientific Computing”, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, USA, 973 p.

[7] Schöberl, M., Senel, C., Fößel, S., Bloss, H., Kaup, A., 2009. “Nonlinear Dark Current Fixed Pattern Noise Compensation for Variable Frame Rate Moving Picture Cameras”, 17th European Signal Processing Conference (EUSIPCO), Vol. 1, Glasgow, Scotland, pp. 268-272.

[8] Wahba, G., 1965, “A least squares estimate of satellite attitude”, SIAM Review, Vol. 7, pp. 409-409.

[9] Xing, F., Dong, Y., You, Z., 2006, “Laboratory calibration of star tracker with brightness independent star identification strategy”, Optical Engineering , Vol. 45, pp. 063604-063604-9.

[10] Zenick, R., 2003, “Lightweight, low-power coarse star tracker”, Proceedings of the AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites, Mission Lessons, SSC03-X-7, Vol. 1, Logan, Utah, pp. 01-14.

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