A method comprises capturing, with a vehicle vision sensor, a color image of a landing site including landing surface markers; converting the color image to a gray scale image; and performing multi-scale-binarization to detect multiple edges of the gray scale image and produce binary images. The method determines contours of edges of the binary images having closed shapes, detects closed shapes of contours of edges having four corners, and verifies whether four-sided candidate contours are valid as potential landing surface markers. If more than one contour is associated with a valid ID within a surface marker library, then the contour within the smallest window size is selected. If multiple contours with the same window size can be associated with a valid ID, then a mean of corresponding corners of multiple contours is computed. The method then performs corner refinement of valid four-sided candidate contours identified as potential landing surface markers.