High Precision Pose Estimation for Uncooperative Targets Based on Monocular Vision and 1D Laser Fusion

The robust pose estimation of uncooperative space targets is a significant and challenging technology for on-orbit service. This work proposes a pose-recovering method for uncooperative targets by fusing one-dimensional (1D) laser and monocular camera units. Specifically, we utilize the laser projection on the camera’s pixel plane and the feature points extracted from images to develop a weight-based fusion method and estimate the accurate scale. To improve the accuracy, the camera and laser rangefinder are tightly coupled to optimize the estimated sequential poses. This method can overcome the known deficiency of the absolute scale of monocular cameras and maintain accurate pose tracking without the baseline constraint of RGB-D cameras. The performance of our proposed method is validated with synthetic images and real-world experiments, our proposed method shows more robust and accurate performance compared with other fusion methods.