Computer Vision News - July 2022

BEST OF CVPR 29 Mathieu Salzmann will take off in 2025/2026. Essentially, the European states decided to fund part of the program via the ESA. More andmore, there are regulations, not official regulations so far, but the space agencies are strongly encouraging companies that are going to launch satellites, like the constellation companies, to have a way of cleaning up the mess they will make. Are the countries that pollute the same ones that pay for the cleaning up, or is there some dissonance between the two? No, I think this is reasonably well aligned. Of course, ESA is one of the big space agencies, so they pollute, and now they want to find a solution. But there are also initiatives like this in the US with NASA. I think it’s pretty equal. I just read that they found debris on Mars from a previous mission. Yeah, there is debris everywhere. We’re now focusing on the Earth’s orbit but could go further in the long run. So, you’re not looking for Laika yet? No, we’re not going for Laika! [he laughs] Where is computer vision most important in your activity? Because we can’t communicate in real- time with the satellites, we need to understand where the debris is, its relative position, and its orientation with respect to the capture system in an autonomous fashion. Computer vision comes into play here. We’ll have cameras on board. From the cameras, we need to analyze the 6D pose automatically, so the rotation and translation of the debris with respect to the chaser. How many are you? For the computer vision part, we’re five.