The relative pose estimation of the space target is indispensable for on-orbit autonomous service missions. Line segment detection is an important step in pose estimation. The traditional line segment detectors show impressive performance under sufficient illumination, while it is easy to fail under complex illumination conditions where the illumination is too bright or too dark. We propose a robust line segment detector for space applications considering the complex illumination in space environments. An improved two-dimensional histogram construction strategy is used to optimize the Otsu method to improve the accuracy of anchor map extraction. To further improve line segment detection’s effect, we introduce an aggregation method that uses the angle difference between segments, the distance between endpoints, and the overlap degree of segments to filter the aggregation candidate segments and connect disjoint line segments that probably came from the same segment. We demonstrate the performance of the proposed line segment detector using a variety of images collected on a semiphysical simulation platform. The results show that our method has better performance than traditional line segment detectors including LSD, Linelet, etc., in terms of line detection precision.

Robust and accurate line segment matching remains a critical challenge in stereo vision, particularly in space-based applications where weak texture, structural symmetry, and strong illumination variations are common. This paper presents a multi-constraint progressive matching framework that integrates epipolar geometry, coplanarity verification, local homography, angular consistency, and distance-ratio invariance to establish reliable line correspondences. A unified cost matrix is constructed by quantitatively encoding these geometric residuals, enabling comprehensive candidate evaluation. To ensure global consistency and suppress mismatches, the final assignment is optimized using a Hungarian algorithm under one-to-one matching constraints. Extensive experiments on a wide range of stereo image pairs demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms several advanced conventional approaches in terms of accuracy, robustness, and computational efficiency, as evidenced by both quantitative and qualitative evaluations.