SPADES: A Realistic Spacecraft Pose Estimation Dataset using Event Sensing

TL;DR

This paper introduces SPADES, a new dataset of real and simulated event data for spacecraft pose estimation, along with improved event representations and filtering methods to enhance deep learning model performance in space applications.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel dataset, SPADES, combining real and simulated event data, and proposes an effective data filtering and event representation method for spacecraft pose estimation.

Findings

Event-based data improves domain adaptation in space scenarios.

The proposed event representation outperforms existing methods.

Filtering enhances training data quality and model accuracy.

Abstract

In recent years, there has been a growing demand for improved autonomy for in-orbit operations such as rendezvous, docking, and proximity maneuvers, leading to increased interest in employing Deep Learning-based Spacecraft Pose Estimation techniques. However, due to limited access to real target datasets, algorithms are often trained using synthetic data and applied in the real domain, resulting in a performance drop due to the domain gap. State-of-the-art approaches employ Domain Adaptation techniques to mitigate this issue. In the search for viable solutions, event sensing has been explored in the past and shown to reduce the domain gap between simulations and real-world scenarios. Event sensors have made significant advancements in hardware and software in recent years. Moreover, the characteristics of the event sensor offer several advantages in space applications compared to RGB sensors. To facilitate further training and evaluation of DL-based models, we introduce a novel dataset, SPADES, comprising real event data acquired in a controlled laboratory environment and simulated event data using the same camera intrinsics. Furthermore, we propose an effective data filtering method to improve the quality of training data, thus enhancing model performance. Additionally, we introduce an image-based event representation that outperforms existing representations. A multifaceted baseline evaluation was conducted using different event representations, event filtering strategies, and algorithmic frameworks, and the results are summarized. The dataset will be made available at http://cvi2.uni.lu/spades.