Star Tracking using an Event Camera
This work addresses star tracking for spacecraft navigation by introducing event cameras, which is an incremental advancement with potential commercial importance in the computer vision community.
The paper tackles star tracking for spacecraft attitude estimation by proposing the use of event cameras instead of conventional optical sensors, achieving potential benefits like lower power consumption and higher speeds through a novel algorithmic pipeline including rotation averaging and bundle adjustment, and releasing a dataset for this application.
Star trackers are primarily optical devices that are used to estimate the attitude of a spacecraft by recognising and tracking star patterns. Currently, most star trackers use conventional optical sensors. In this application paper, we propose the usage of event sensors for star tracking. There are potentially two benefits of using event sensors for star tracking: lower power consumption and higher operating speeds. Our main contribution is to formulate an algorithmic pipeline for star tracking from event data that includes novel formulations of rotation averaging and bundle adjustment. In addition, we also release with this paper a dataset for star tracking using event cameras. With this work, we introduce the problem of star tracking using event cameras to the computer vision community, whose expertise in SLAM and geometric optimisation can be brought to bear on this commercially important application.