Bridging the Synthetic-Real Gap: Supervised Domain Adaptation for Robust Spacecraft 6-DoF Pose Estimation

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Singh, Inder Pal, Chenni, Nidhal Eddine, Shabayek, Abd El Rahman, Rathinam, Arunkumar, Aouada, Djamila
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866911159130521600
author Singh, Inder Pal
Chenni, Nidhal Eddine
Shabayek, Abd El Rahman
Rathinam, Arunkumar
Aouada, Djamila
author_facet Singh, Inder Pal
Chenni, Nidhal Eddine
Shabayek, Abd El Rahman
Rathinam, Arunkumar
Aouada, Djamila
contents Spacecraft Pose Estimation (SPE) is a fundamental capability for autonomous space operations such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing. Hybrid pipelines that combine object detection, keypoint regression, and Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solvers have recently achieved strong results on synthetic datasets, yet their performance deteriorates sharply on real or lab-generated imagery due to the persistent synthetic-to-real domain gap. Existing unsupervised domain adaptation approaches aim to mitigate this issue but often underperform when a modest number of labeled target samples are available. In this work, we propose the first Supervised Domain Adaptation (SDA) framework tailored for SPE keypoint regression. Building on the Learning Invariant Representation and Risk (LIRR) paradigm, our method jointly optimizes domain-invariant representations and task-specific risk using both labeled synthetic and limited labeled real data, thereby reducing generalization error under domain shift. Extensive experiments on the SPEED+ benchmark demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms source-only, fine-tuning, and oracle baselines. Notably, with only 5% labeled target data, our method matches or surpasses oracle performance trained on larger fractions of labeled data. The framework is lightweight, backbone-agnostic, and computationally efficient, offering a practical pathway toward robust and deployable spacecraft pose estimation in real-world space environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13792
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Bridging the Synthetic-Real Gap: Supervised Domain Adaptation for Robust Spacecraft 6-DoF Pose Estimation
Singh, Inder Pal
Chenni, Nidhal Eddine
Shabayek, Abd El Rahman
Rathinam, Arunkumar
Aouada, Djamila
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
Spacecraft Pose Estimation (SPE) is a fundamental capability for autonomous space operations such as rendezvous, docking, and in-orbit servicing. Hybrid pipelines that combine object detection, keypoint regression, and Perspective-n-Point (PnP) solvers have recently achieved strong results on synthetic datasets, yet their performance deteriorates sharply on real or lab-generated imagery due to the persistent synthetic-to-real domain gap. Existing unsupervised domain adaptation approaches aim to mitigate this issue but often underperform when a modest number of labeled target samples are available. In this work, we propose the first Supervised Domain Adaptation (SDA) framework tailored for SPE keypoint regression. Building on the Learning Invariant Representation and Risk (LIRR) paradigm, our method jointly optimizes domain-invariant representations and task-specific risk using both labeled synthetic and limited labeled real data, thereby reducing generalization error under domain shift. Extensive experiments on the SPEED+ benchmark demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms source-only, fine-tuning, and oracle baselines. Notably, with only 5% labeled target data, our method matches or surpasses oracle performance trained on larger fractions of labeled data. The framework is lightweight, backbone-agnostic, and computationally efficient, offering a practical pathway toward robust and deployable spacecraft pose estimation in real-world space environments.
title Bridging the Synthetic-Real Gap: Supervised Domain Adaptation for Robust Spacecraft 6-DoF Pose Estimation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13792