Vision-based satellite recognition and pose estimation using Gaussian process regression

In this paper, we address the problem of vision-based satellite recognition and pose estimation, which is to recognize the satellite from multiviews and estimate the relative poses using imaging sensors. We propose a vision-based method to solve these two problems using Gaussian process regression (GPR). Assuming that the regression function mapping from the image (or feature) of the target satellite to its category or pose follows a Gaussian process (GP) properly parameterized by a mean function and a covariance function, the predictive equations can be easily obtained by a maximum-likelihood approach when training data are given. These explicit formulations can not only offer the category or estimated pose by the mean value of the predicted output but also give its uncertainty by the variance which makes the predicted result convincing and applicable in practice. Besides, we also introduce a manifold constraint to the output of the GPR model to improve its performance for satellite pose estimation. Extensive experiments are performed on two simulated image datasets containing satellite images of 1D and 2D pose variations, as well as different noises and lighting conditions. Experimental results validate the effectiveness and robustness of our approach.