Detection and Certification of Faint Streaks in Astronomical Images

Vojtěch Cvrček, Radim Šára

2019

Abstract

Fast-moving celestial objects, like near-Earth objects (NEOs), orbiting space debris, or meteors, appear as streaks superimposed over the star background in images taken by an optical telescope at long exposures. As the apparent magnitude of the object increases (the object becomes fainter), its detection becomes progressively harder. We discuss a statistical procedure that makes a binary decision on the presence/absence of a streak in the image which is called streak certification. The certification is based purely on a single input image and a public star catalog, using a minimalistic statistical model. Certification accuracy greater than 90% for streaks of arbitrary orientation, longer than 500 pixels, and the signal-to-background log-ratio is better than −10dB is achieved on the same dataset as in an earlier similar method, whose performance is thus exceeded, especially for close-to-horizontal streaks. We also show that the certification decision indicates detection failure well.

Paper Citation

in Harvard Style

Cvrček V. and Šára R. (2019). Detection and Certification of Faint Streaks in Astronomical Images. In Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2019) - Volume 5: VISAPP; ISBN 978-989-758-354-4, SciTePress, pages 498-509. DOI: 10.5220/0007399804980509

in Bibtex Style

@conference{visapp19,
author={Vojtěch Cvrček and Radim Šára},
title={Detection and Certification of Faint Streaks in Astronomical Images},
booktitle={Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2019) - Volume 5: VISAPP},
year={2019},
pages={498-509},
publisher={SciTePress},
organization={INSTICC},
doi={10.5220/0007399804980509},
isbn={978-989-758-354-4},
}

in EndNote Style

TY - CONF

JO - Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics Theory and Applications (VISIGRAPP 2019) - Volume 5: VISAPP
TI - Detection and Certification of Faint Streaks in Astronomical Images
SN - 978-989-758-354-4
AU - Cvrček V.
AU - Šára R.
PY - 2019
SP - 498
EP - 509
DO - 10.5220/0007399804980509
PB - SciTePress