DreamSat-Pose: Spacecraft Pose Estimation from Single-View 3D Reconstructions and Learned 2D-3D Feature Matching
It addresses the challenging problem of 6-DoF pose estimation for unknown spacecraft in autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations, which is critical for space missions.
The paper proposes a novel framework for single-shot shape and pose estimation of unknown spacecraft, achieving 0.157 degrees mean pointing error on the SPE3R dataset using only a single image and reconstructed geometry, demonstrating strong generalization to unseen spacecraft.
6-DoF pose estimation is a critical task in autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations. In the case of an unknown target, this task becomes challenging as it shall be paired with the reconstruction of the target shape model. In this article, we propose a novel framework for single-shot shape and pose estimation of unknown spacecraft objects. Given a single image, we first reconstruct a 3D shape model of the target, then estimate the relative six-degrees-of-freedom pose by learning dense 2D-3D correspondences. The image features are extracted using a frozen DINOv3 vision transformer, while the geometric features are computed from the reconstructed point cloud using a trainable dynamic graph convolutional neural network encoder. A dual-stream transformer matcher refines descriptors through alternating self- and cross-attention, producing soft correspondences that are passed to a Perspective-$n$-Point solver for pose recovery. We evaluate the method on the SPE3R dataset and consider FoundationPose as a representative baseline for current state-of-the-art capabilities. Results show reliable pose estimates achieving 0.157 degrees mean pointing error using only a single image and reconstructed geometry, demonstrating strong generalization to unseen spacecraft.