ChiNet: deep recurrent convolutional learning for multimodal spacecraft pose estimation

This paper presents an innovative deep learning pipeline which estimates the relative pose of a spacecraft by incorporating the temporal information from a rendezvous sequence. It leverages the performance of long short-term memory (LSTM) units in modelling sequences of data for the processing of features extracted by a convolutional neural network (CNN) backbone. Three distinct training strategies, which follow a coarse-to-fine funnelled approach, are combined to facilitate feature learning and improve end-to-end pose estimation by regression. The capability of CNNs to autonomously ascertain feature representations from images is exploited to fuse thermal infrared data with electro-optical red-green-blue (RGB) inputs, thus mitigating the effects of artifacts from imaging space objects in the visible wavelength. Each contribution of the proposed framework, dubbed ChiNet, is demonstrated on a synthetic dataset, and the complete pipeline is validated on experimental data