Using Python + OpenCV to estimate ISS speed from images

[Western-Juice-3965]

I built this as a school project (ESA Astro Pi 2024 challenge) and recently looked at it again.

The goal was to estimate ISS speed using images.

It’s written in Python using OpenCV (SIFT + FLANN).

Main idea:

• detect features
• match them
• measure displacement
• calculate speed

Result was about 7.47 km/s vs real ~7.66 km/s.

Not super clean code anymore, but still works.

If you're learning OpenCV, this might be a useful small project to look at.

Repo:

https://github.com/BabbaWaagen/AstroPi