Event-based Star Tracking via Multiresolution Progressive Hough Transforms
This work addresses the need for energy-efficient and fast star trackers for space or aerospace applications, representing an incremental improvement over existing event-based methods.
The paper tackled the problem of star tracking using event sensors by proposing an event-based processing approach that integrates event data via multiresolution Hough Transforms and refines orientations with rotation averaging, resulting in a technique that is more efficient and accurate than state-of-the-art event-based motion estimation schemes.
Star trackers are state-of-the-art attitude estimation devices which function by recognising and tracking star patterns. Most commercial star trackers use conventional optical sensors. A recent alternative is to use event sensors, which could enable more energy efficient and faster star trackers. However, this demands new algorithms that can efficiently cope with high-speed asynchronous data, and are feasible on resource-constrained computing platforms. To this end, we propose an event-based processing approach for star tracking. Our technique operates on the event stream from a star field, by using multiresolution Hough Transforms to time-progressively integrate event data and produce accurate relative rotations. Optimisation via rotation averaging is then used to fuse the relative rotations and jointly refine the absolute orientations. Our technique is designed to be feasible for asynchronous operation on standard hardware. Moreover, compared to state-of-the-art event-based motion estimation schemes, our technique is much more efficient and accurate.