NESP

Neural Estimation of Spacecraft Pose.

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Period of Performance: 2022–2026
My role: KU Leuven PI
Additional Contributors: Antoine Legrand (Ph.D. Student), Christophe De Vleeschouwer.
sponsor Funded by Service public de Wallonie (SPW).
sponsor Funded by Aerospacelab.
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Neural Estimation of Spacecraft Pose.

If first html tag is indented, and this include is called after a list, the html tag is considered a list element, and things go wrong. Leaving a hidden unindented line here
Period of Performance: 2022–2026
My role: KU Leuven PI
Additional Contributors: Antoine Legrand (Ph.D. Student), Christophe De Vleeschouwer.
sponsor Funded by Service public de Wallonie (SPW).
sponsor Funded by Aerospacelab.
project thumbnail

We study the problem of estimating the pose of a known spacecraft in orbital lighting conditions. Building on the state of art in terrestrial application, we specifically focus on a model that solves the problem in an end-to-end fashion, which delivers high accuracy at low computational cost, thanks to parallelizability.

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Overview of the existing methods to estimate a spacecraft’s pose. (a) Direct methods use a convolutional neural network to directly predict the target 6D pose. (b) Keypoints-based methods exploit a convolutional neural network to predict pre-defined keypoint coordinates which are then used to recover the pose through a Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solver. (c) Our solution combines both methods as it relies on a first, convolutional, neural network to extract the coordinates of pre-defined keypoints and a neural network to predict pose from those coordinates. The solution is therefore both keypoints-based and end-to-end trainable.

State-of-the-art methods for estimating the pose of spacecrafts in Earth-orbit images rely on a convolutional neural network either to directly regress the spacecraft’s 6D pose parameters, or to localize pre-defined keypoints that are then used to compute pose through a Perspective-n-Point solver. In our first paper (Legrand et al., 2023), we study an alternative solution that uses a convolutional network to predict keypoint locations, which are in turn used by a second network to infer the spacecraft’s 6D pose. This formulation retains the performance advantages of keypoint-based methods, while affording end-to-end training and faster processing. Our paper is the first to evaluate the applicability of such a method to the space domain. On the SPEED dataset, our approach achieves a mean rotation error of 4.69° and a mean translation error of 1.59% with a throughput of 31 fps. We show that computational complexity can be reduced at the cost of a minor loss in accuracy.

References

  1. End-to-end Neural Estimation of Spacecraft Pose with Intermediate Detection of Keypoints.
    Antoine Legrand, Renaud Detry, and Christophe De Vleeschouwer.
    In Computer Vision – ECCV 2022 Workshops, 2023 (Best presentation award).
    Bib DOI PDF