CD-TrGNN: A Complex-Domain Transformer-Graph Neural Network for ISAR Space Target Attitude Estimation

In ground-based space surveillance, space target attitude estimation is critical for space situational awareness, yet existing methods based on inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images suffer from three core limitations: phase information is discarded in amplitude-only processing, convolutional neural networks have a restricted global receptive field, and the physical topology of satellite components is not explicitly modeled. To address these issues, we propose a complex-domain Transformer-graph neural network (CD-TrGNN) that unifies global context modeling and adaptive topological reasoning in an end-to-end framework. Specifically, a complex-domain Transformer module (CD-Transformer) with tailored attention captures long-range dependencies among image patches while preserving both amplitude and phase information; a complex-domain graph convolution module (CD-GC) with learnable adjacency matrices and a dual-path update mechanism explicitly encodes the structural relationships among satellite parts. On a self-built ISAR complex image dataset, CD-TrGNN achieves a three-axis mean absolute error of only 1.70°, substantially outperforming six representative baselines. Ablation experiments confirm the effectiveness of complex-domain processing, global attention, and topological reasoning. At a 5 dB signal-to-noise ratio, the error remains at 2.81°, and the accuracy stays below 2° for two different satellite structures. These results demonstrate that CD-TrGNN can fully exploit the information in ISAR complex images, enabling high-accuracy and highly robust attitude estimation.