Three-dimensional shape reconstruction of uncooperative spacecraft with texture-guided depth upsampling

Abstract

An important aspect of space exploration and situational awareness involves the characterization of the surface geometry of space objects. This paper puts forward a precise three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction method for uncooperative spacecraft based on a low-resolution time-of-flight (ToF) depth camera coupled with a high-resolution optical texture camera. In the proposed approach, a texture-guided depth upsampling algorithm is adopted to reconstruct high-resolution 3D shapes with high-precision geometry and detailed textures, in which the low-resolution depth map upsampling is guided by the high-resolution texture image. Then, in order to build a globally consistent 3D surface model, a scale estimator-based iterative closest point algorithm is put forward to align the 3D shapes of the uncooperative spacecraft from different views. The experimental results demonstrate both quantitatively and qualitatively that our approach achieves a significant improvement in reconstruction results compared to ToF-based solutions.