1 research outputs found
Topological Sweep for Multi-Target Detection of Geostationary Space Objects
Conducting surveillance of the Earth's orbit is a key task towards achieving
space situational awareness (SSA). Our work focuses on the optical detection of
man-made objects (e.g., satellites, space debris) in Geostationary orbit (GEO),
which is home to major space assets such as telecommunications and navigational
satellites. GEO object detection is challenging due to the distance of the
targets, which appear as small dim points among a clutter of bright stars. In
this paper, we propose a novel multi-target detection technique based on
topological sweep, to find GEO objects from a short sequence of optical images.
Our topological sweep technique exploits the geometric duality that underpins
the approximately linear trajectory of target objects across the input
sequence, to extract the targets from significant clutter and noise. Unlike
standard multi-target methods, our algorithm deterministically solves a
combinatorial problem to ensure high-recall rates without requiring accurate
initializations. The usage of geometric duality also yields an algorithm that
is computationally efficient and suitable for online processing.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figures, accepted to IEEE Transactions on Signal
Processin