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Main Authors: Gopu, Bala Prenith Reddy, Quinn, Patrick, Nehma, George M., Tiwari, Madhur, Ueckermann, Matt, Hinckley, David, McKenna, Christopher
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00147
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author Gopu, Bala Prenith Reddy
Quinn, Patrick
Nehma, George M.
Tiwari, Madhur
Ueckermann, Matt
Hinckley, David
McKenna, Christopher
author_facet Gopu, Bala Prenith Reddy
Quinn, Patrick
Nehma, George M.
Tiwari, Madhur
Ueckermann, Matt
Hinckley, David
McKenna, Christopher
contents On-orbit inspection imagery is crucial as it enables characterization of non-cooperative resident space objects, providing the geometry and structural condition essential for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing mission planning. However, most existing neural implicit surface reconstruction methods have been confined to synthetic or hardware-in-the-loop data with known camera poses and controlled illumination. In this work, we present a pipeline for neural implicit surface reconstruction of non-cooperative space objects from monocular inspection imagery. We demonstrate it on publicly released ISS inspection footage from the STS-119 mission and publicly released on-orbit inspection footage of an H-IIA rocket upper stage. We find that segmentation-based background removal is essential for successful camera pose estimation from real on-orbit footage, where background variation between frames caused direct processing to fail entirely. We further incorporate photometric correction of per-frame exposure variations and analyze its behavior across datasets, finding that performance in shadowed regions varies with the illumination characteristics of the input footage.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_00147
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle From Images2Mesh: A 3D Surface Reconstruction Pipeline for Non-Cooperative Space Objects
Gopu, Bala Prenith Reddy
Quinn, Patrick
Nehma, George M.
Tiwari, Madhur
Ueckermann, Matt
Hinckley, David
McKenna, Christopher
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
On-orbit inspection imagery is crucial as it enables characterization of non-cooperative resident space objects, providing the geometry and structural condition essential for active debris removal and on-orbit servicing mission planning. However, most existing neural implicit surface reconstruction methods have been confined to synthetic or hardware-in-the-loop data with known camera poses and controlled illumination. In this work, we present a pipeline for neural implicit surface reconstruction of non-cooperative space objects from monocular inspection imagery. We demonstrate it on publicly released ISS inspection footage from the STS-119 mission and publicly released on-orbit inspection footage of an H-IIA rocket upper stage. We find that segmentation-based background removal is essential for successful camera pose estimation from real on-orbit footage, where background variation between frames caused direct processing to fail entirely. We further incorporate photometric correction of per-frame exposure variations and analyze its behavior across datasets, finding that performance in shadowed regions varies with the illumination characteristics of the input footage.
title From Images2Mesh: A 3D Surface Reconstruction Pipeline for Non-Cooperative Space Objects
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.00147