Joint attitude estimation and 3D neural reconstruction of non-cooperative space objects

Abstract

Obtaining a better knowledge of the current state and behavior of objects orbiting Earth has proven to be essential for a range of applications such as active debris removal, in-orbit maintenance, or anomaly detection. 3D models represent a valuable source of information in the field of Space Situational Awareness (SSA). In this work, we leveraged Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF) to perform 3D reconstruction of non-cooperative space objects from simulated images. This scenario is challenging for NeRF models due to unusual camera characteristics and environmental conditions : mono-chromatic images, unknown object orientation, limited viewing angles, absence of diffuse lighting etc. In this work we focus primarly on the joint optimization of camera poses alongside the NeRF. Our experimental results show that the most accurate 3D reconstruction is achieved when training with successive images one-by-one. We estimate camera poses by optimizing an uniform rotation and use regularization to prevent successive poses from being too far apart.