A Preliminary Research on Space Situational Awareness Based on Event Cameras
This work addresses space situational awareness for satellite operators or space agencies, but it is incremental as it applies an existing sensor type to a new domain without major methodological innovations.
The researchers tackled the problem of space situational awareness by testing event cameras in a simulated space lighting environment, finding that these cameras can leverage their high temporal resolution, low latency, and other advantages for this application.
Event camera is a new type of sensor that is different from traditional cameras. Each pixel is triggered asynchronously by an event. The trigger event is the change of the brightness irradiated on the pixel. If the increment or decrement is higher than a certain threshold, the event is output. Compared with traditional cameras, event cameras have the advantages of high temporal resolution, low latency, high dynamic range, low bandwidth and low power consumption. We carried out a series of observation experiments in a simulated space lighting environment. The experimental results show that the event camera can give full play to the above advantages in space situational awareness. This article first introduces the basic principles of the event camera, then analyzes its advantages and disadvantages, then introduces the observation experiment and analyzes the experimental results, and finally, a workflow of space situational awareness based on event cameras is given.