A Preliminary Research on Space Situational Awareness Based on Event Cameras

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of event cameras, a novel sensor technology, for space situational awareness, demonstrating their advantages through simulated experiments and proposing a workflow for their application.

Contribution

It introduces the application of event cameras to space situational awareness, including experimental validation and a proposed operational workflow.

Findings

Event cameras offer high temporal resolution and low latency in space observation.

Experimental results confirm the advantages of event cameras in space lighting conditions.

A workflow for space situational awareness using event cameras is proposed.

Abstract

Event camera is a new type of sensor that is different from traditional cameras. Each pixel is triggered asynchronously by an event. The trigger event is the change of the brightness irradiated on the pixel. If the increment or decrement is higher than a certain threshold, the event is output. Compared with traditional cameras, event cameras have the advantages of high temporal resolution, low latency, high dynamic range, low bandwidth and low power consumption. We carried out a series of observation experiments in a simulated space lighting environment. The experimental results show that the event camera can give full play to the above advantages in space situational awareness. This article first introduces the basic principles of the event camera, then analyzes its advantages and disadvantages, then introduces the observation experiment and analyzes the experimental results, and finally, a workflow of space situational awareness based on event cameras is given.