Deep 1D Landmark Representation Learning for Space Target Pose Estimation

Monocular vision-based pose estimation for known uncooperative space targets plays an increasingly important role in on-orbit operations. The existing state-of-the-art methods of space target pose estimation build the 2D-3D correspondences to recover the space target pose, where space target landmark regression is a key component of the methods. The 2D heatmap representation is the dominant descriptor in landmark regression. However, its quantization error grows dramatically under low-resolution input conditions, and extra post-processing is usually needed to compute the accurate 2D pixel coordinates of landmarks from heatmaps. To overcome the aforementioned problems, we propose a novel 1D landmark representation that encodes the horizontal and vertical pixel coordinates of a landmark as two independent 1D vectors. Furthermore, we also propose a space target landmark regression network to regress the locations of landmarks in the image using 1D landmark representations. Comprehensive experiments conducted on the SPEED dataset show that the proposed 1D landmark representation helps the proposed space target landmark regression network outperform existing state-of-the-art methods at various input resolutions, especially at low resolutions. Based on the 2D landmarks predicted by the proposed space target landmark regression network, the error of space target pose estimation is also smaller than existing state-of-the-art methods under all input resolution conditions.