Event-based Star Tracking via Multiresolution Progressive Hough Transforms

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.

Star Tracking using an Event Camera

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.