Spacecraft Homography Pose Estimation with Single-Stage Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Spacecraft pose estimation using computer vision has garnered increasing attention in research areas such as automation system theory, control theory, sensors and instruments, robot technology, and automation software. Confronted with the extreme environment of space, existing spacecraft pose estima...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Shengpeng Chen, Wenyi Yang, Wei Wang, Jianting Mai, Jian Liang, Xiaohu Zhang
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2024-03-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/24/6/1828
Description
Summary:Spacecraft pose estimation using computer vision has garnered increasing attention in research areas such as automation system theory, control theory, sensors and instruments, robot technology, and automation software. Confronted with the extreme environment of space, existing spacecraft pose estimation methods are predominantly multi-stage networks with complex operations. In this study, we propose an approach for spacecraft homography pose estimation with a single-stage deep convolutional neural network for the first time. We formulated a homomorphic geometric constraint equation for spacecraft with planar features. Additionally, we employed a single-stage 2D keypoint regression network to obtain homography 2D keypoint coordinates for spacecraft. After decomposition to obtain the rough spacecraft pose based on the homography matrix constructed according to the geometric constraint equation, a loss function based on pixel errors was employed to refine the spacecraft pose. We conducted extensive experiments using widely used spacecraft pose estimation datasets and compared our method with state-of-the-art techniques in the field to demonstrate its effectiveness.
ISSN:1424-8220