Vision-based pose estimation for textureless space objects by contour points matching

This paper presents a novel vision-based method to solve the 6-degree-of-freedom pose estimation problem of textureless space objects from a single monocular image. Our approach follows a coarse-to-fine procedure, utilizing only shape and contour information of the input image. To achieve invariance to initialization, we select a series of projection images that are similar to the input image and establish many-to-one 2D-3D correspondences by contour feature matching. Intensive attention is focused on outlier rejection and we introduce an innovative strategy to fully utilize geometric matching information to guide pose calculation. Experiments based on simulated images are carried out, and the results manifest that pose estimation error of our approach is about 1% even in situations with heavy outlier correspondences.