SPIN: Spacecraft Imagery for Navigation

Abstract: The scarcity of data acquired under actual space operational conditions poses a significant challenge for developing learning-based visual navigation algorithms crucial for autonomous spacecraft navigation. This data shortage is primarily due to the prohibitive costs and inherent complexities of space operations. While existing datasets, predominantly relying on computer-simulated data, have partially addressed this gap, they present notable limitations. Firstly, these datasets often utilize proprietary image generation tools, restricting the evaluation of navigation methods in novel, unseen scenarios. Secondly, they provide limited ground-truth data, typically focusing solely on the spacecraft's translation and rotation relative to the camera. To address these limitations, we present SPIN (SPacecraft Imagery for Navigation), an open-source spacecraft image generation tool designed to support a wide range of visual navigation scenarios in space, with a particular focus on relative navigation tasks. SPIN provides multiple modalities of ground-truth data and allows researchers to employ custom 3D models of satellites, define specific camera-relative poses, and adjust settings such as camera parameters or environmental illumination conditions. We also propose a method for exploiting our tool as a data augmentation module. We validate our tool on the spacecraft pose estimation task by training with a SPIN-generated replica of SPEED+, reaching a 47% average error reduction on SPEED+ testbed data (that simulates realistic space conditions), further reducing it to a 60% error reduction when using SPIN as a data augmentation method. Both the SPIN tool (and source code) and our SPIN-generated version of SPEED+ will be publicly released upon paper acceptance on GitHub. https://github.com/vpulab/SPIN