A Practical Star Image Registration Algorithm Using Radial Module and Rotation Angle Features

Star image registration is the most important step in the application of astronomical image differencing, stacking, and mosaicking, which requires high robustness, accuracy, and real-time capability on the part of the algorithm. At present, there are no high-performance registration algorithms available in this field. In the present paper, we propose a star image registration algorithm that relies only on radial module features (RMF) and rotation angle features (RAF) while providing excellent robustness, high accuracy, and good real-time performance. The test results on a large amount of simulated and real data show that the comprehensive performance of the proposed algorithm is significantly better than the four classical baseline algorithms as judged by the presence of rotation, insufficient overlapping area, false stars, position deviation, magnitude deviation, and complex sky background, making it a more ideal star image registration algorithm than current alternatives.