VIPE: Visible and Infrared Fused Pose Estimation Framework for Space Noncooperative Objects

Accurate pose estimation of non-cooperative space objects is crucial for applications such as satellite maintenance, space debris removal, and on-orbit assembly. However, monocular pose estimation methods face significant challenges in environments with limited visibility. Different from the traditional pose estimation methods that use images from a single band as input, we propose a novel deep learning-based pose estimation framework for non-cooperative space objects by fusing visible and infrared images. First, we introduce an image fusion subnetwork that integrates multi-scale features from visible and infrared images into a unified embedding space, preserving the detailed features of visible images and the intensity information of infrared images. Subsequently, we design a robust pose estimation subnetwork that leverages the rich information from the fused images to achieve accurate pose estimation. By combining these two subnetworks, we construct the Visible and Infrared Fused Pose Estimation Framework (VIPE) for non-cooperative space objects. Additionally, we present a Bimodal-Vision Pose Estimation (BVPE) dataset, comprising 3,630 visible-infrared image pairs, to facilitate research in this domain. Extensive experiments on the BVPE dataset demonstrate that VIPE significantly outperforms existing monocular pose estimation methods, particularly in complex space environments, providing more reliable and accurate pose estimation results.