# Bridging the Domain Gap for Flight-Ready Spaceborne Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.11661 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.11661/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 138 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 18 Sep 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [A Simple Framework for Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05709/) (2020)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Layer Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.06450/) (2016)
- [SGDR: Stochastic Gradient Descent with Warm Restarts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.03983/) (2016)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [MobileNetV2: Inverted Residuals and Linear Bottlenecks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.04381/) (2018)
- [Training data-efficient image transformers & distillation through attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.12877/) (2020)
- [Going Deeper with Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.4842/) (2014)
- [A ConvNet for the 2020s](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03545/) (2022)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [RandAugment: Practical automated data augmentation with a reduced search space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13719/) (2019)
- [Learning both Weights and Connections for Efficient Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02626/) (2015)
- [Arbitrary Style Transfer in Real-time with Adaptive Instance Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06868/) (2017)
- [Searching for MobileNetV3](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.02244/) (2019)
- [The Many Faces of Robustness: A Critical Analysis of Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16241/) (2020)
- [Group Normalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.08494/) (2018)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [ImageNet-trained CNNs are biased towards texture; increasing shape bias improves accuracy and robustness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.12231/) (2018)
- [Deep High-Resolution Representation Learning for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07919/) (2019)
- [Moment Matching for Multi-Source Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01754/) (2018)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Deep CORAL: Correlation Alignment for Deep Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.01719/) (2016)
- [Mixed Precision Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.03740/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Generalizable Spacecraft Trajectory Generation via Multimodal Learning with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11723/) (2024)
- [Fast Learning of Non-Cooperative Spacecraft 3D Models through Primitive Initialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19459/) (2025)
- [Improved 3D Gaussian Splatting of Unknown Spacecraft Structure Using Space Environment Illumination Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.23998/) (2025)
- [Post-Launch Capability Expansion of Vision-Language Models via Prompting for On-Orbit Spacecraft Inspection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.15427/) (2026)
- [Enabling Robust, Real-Time Verification of Vision-Based Navigation through View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.02993/) (2025)
- [Vision Foundation Models with Synthetic-Only Training for Monocular Spacecraft Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26561/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents Spacecraft Pose Network v3 (SPNv3), a Neural Network (NN) for monocular pose estimation of a known, non-cooperative target spacecraft. SPNv3 is designed and trained to be computationally efficient while providing robustness to spaceborne images that have not been observed during offline training and validation on the ground. These characteristics are essential to deploying NNs on space-grade edge devices. They are achieved through careful NN design choices, and an extensive trade-off analysis reveals features such as data augmentation, transfer learning and vision transformer architecture as a few of those that contribute to simultaneously maximizing robustness and minimizing computational overhead. Experiments demonstrate that the final SPNv3 can achieve state-of-the-art pose accuracy on hardware-in-the-loop images from a robotic testbed while having trained exclusively on computer-generated synthetic images, effectively bridging the domain gap between synthetic and real imagery. At the same time, SPNv3 runs well above the update frequency of modern satellite navigation filters when tested on a representative graphical processing unit system with flight heritage. Overall, SPNv3 is an efficient, flight-ready NN model readily applicable to close-range rendezvous and proximity operations with target resident space objects.