In recent years, image segmentation techniques based on deep learning have achieved many applications in remote sensing, medical, and autonomous driving fields. In space exploration, the segmentation of spacecraft objects by monocular images can support space station on-orbit assembly tasks and space target position and attitude estimation tasks, which has essential research value and broad application prospects. However, there is no segmentation network designed for spacecraft targets. This paper proposes an end-to-end spacecraft image segmentation network using the semantic segmentation network DeepLabv3+ as the basic framework. We develop a multi-scale neural network based on sparse convolution. First, the feature extraction capability is improved by the dilated convolutional network. Second, we introduce the channel attention mechanism into the network to recalibrate the feature responses. Finally, we design a parallel atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) structure that enhances the contextual information of the network. To verify the effectiveness of the method, we built a spacecraft segmentation dataset on which we conduct experiments on the segmentation algorithm. The experimental results show that the encoder+ attention+ decoder structure proposed in this paper, which focuses on high-level and low-level features, can obtain clear and complete masks of spacecraft targets with high segmentation accuracy. Compared with DeepLabv3+, our method is a significant improvement. We also conduct an ablation study to research the effectiveness of our network framework.
Keywords: DeepLabv3+; deep learning; dilated convolution; multi-scale; semantic segmentation.