Vision-based Detection and Tracking for Space Navigation in a Rendezvous Context

This paper focuses on navigation issues for space au- tonomous, uncooperative rendezvous with targets such as satellites, space vehicles or debris. In order to fully local- ize, using a vision sensor, a chaser spacecraft with respect to a target spacecraft or debris, a visual model-based de- tection and tracking technique is proposed. Our track- ing approach processes complete 3D models of complex objects, of any shape by taking advantage of GPU ac- celeration. From the rendered model, correspondences are found with image edges and the pose estimation task is then addressed as a nonlinear minimization. For de- tection, which initializes the tracking, pose estimation is based on foreground/background segmentation and on an efficient contour matching procedure with synthetic views, over a few initial images. Our methods have been evaluated on both synthetic images and real images.