PocketSPAD: A Single-Photon Avalanche Diode and RGB Camera Dataset for Spacecraft Pose Estimation under Diverse Illumination Conditions

PocketSPAD contains image sequences of a 5 × 5 × 5 cm PocketQube satellite attached to the end-effector of a robotic arm, imaged simultaneously with a conventional RGB camera (ORBBEC Astra Embedded S) and a single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) camera (Pi Imaging Technologies' SPAD 512). The dataset is intended for researchers and engineers developing and evaluating vision-based spacecraft pose estimation methods, especially under challenging illumination conditions. Data were recorded under a range of illumination scenarios, including ambient laboratory lighting, complete darkness, and sun-simulator conditions, with image sequences, timestamps, and per-frame satellite pose annotations provided for each available sensing modality. The pose annotations are expressed in the corresponding camera coordinate frames. To facilitate browsing and visualization, all released SPAD images are stored as 8-bit images obtained by linearly rescaling the original 4-bit pixel values. File organization Each sequence is provided as a separate ZIP archive and contains the following items for the available sensing modalities: spad/: SPAD images. spad.json: SPAD image timestamps and satellite pose annotations. orbbec/: RGB images. orbbec.json: RGB image timestamps and satellite pose annotations. Please refer to the accompanying README for more details. When using the data in an academic context, please cite the following paper. Gao, Z., Price, A. L., Rodríguez-Martínez, D., Hafiz, M., Sajjad, N., Larsen, R., & Salzmann, M. (2026). Seeing Through Sunlight: Single-Photon Avalanche Diode Cameras for Space Applications. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, accepted for publication. The DOI and full publication details will be added when available.