More Accurate Pose Initialization with Redundant Measurements

Abstract

The problem described in this paper concerns the problem of initial pose estimation of a non-cooperative target for space applications. We propose to use a Photonic Mixer Device (PMD) sensor in a close range for the visual navigation in order to estimate position and attitude of the space object. The advantage of the ranging PMD sensor is that it provides two different sources of data: depth and amplitude information of the imaging scene. In this work we make use of it and propose a follow-up initial pose improvement technique with the amplitude images from PMD sensor. It means that we primary calculate the pose of the target with the depth image and then correct the pose to get more accurate result. The algorithm is tested for the set of images in the range 8 to 4.9 meters. The obtained results have shown the evident improvement of the initial pose after correction with the proposed technique.