Star-Fusion: A Multi-modal Transformer Architecture for Discrete Celestial Orientation via Spherical Topology

TL;DR

Star-Fusion introduces a multi-modal transformer architecture that discretizes celestial orientation estimation on the sphere, effectively handling topological challenges and enabling efficient, accurate spacecraft navigation.

Contribution

It reformulates celestial orientation estimation as a topological classification task using spherical clustering and a multi-modal fusion architecture, improving robustness and efficiency.

Findings

Achieves 93.4% Top-1 accuracy on synthetic dataset.

Maintains 18.4 ms inference latency on COTS hardware.

Effectively mitigates coordinate wrapping artifacts.

Abstract

Reliable celestial attitude determination is a critical requirement for autonomous spacecraft navigation, yet traditional "Lost-in-Space" (LIS) algorithms often suffer from high computational overhead and sensitivity to sensor-induced noise. While deep learning has emerged as a promising alternative, standard regression models are often confounded by the non-Euclidean topology of the celestial sphere and by the periodic boundary conditions of Right Ascension (RA) and Declination (Dec). In this paper, we present Star-Fusion, a multi-modal architecture that reformulates orientation estimation as a discrete topological classification task. Our approach leverages spherical K-Means clustering to partition the celestial sphere into K topologically consistent regions, effectively mitigating coordinate wrapping artifacts. The proposed architecture employs a tripartite fusion strategy: a SwinV2-Tiny transformer backbone for photometric feature extraction, a convolutional heatmap branch for spatial grounding, and a coordinate-based MLP for geometric anchoring. Experimental evaluations on a synthetic Hipparcos-derived dataset demonstrate that Star-Fusion achieves a Top-1 accuracy of 93.4% and a Top-3 accuracy of 97.8%. Furthermore, the model exhibits high computational efficiency, maintaining an inference latency of 18.4 ms on resource-constrained COTS hardware, making it a viable candidate for real-time onboard deployment in next-generation satellite constellations.