Fast satellite streak detection for high-resolution image

Abstract

For the observation of satellites in earth orbits, the satellites must be detected within a certain time limit and the coordinates of the satellites must be delivered to the tracking system. For the satellite detection, a high-resolution image is required because using a low-resolution image may cause ambiguity of the positions of the detected satellites in an image, which leads to a large position error of the satellites in the celestial coordinate system. The problem is that processing a high-resolution image for the satellite detection requires a lot of computation time and may fail to deliver the satellite coordinates to the tracking system within a given time limit. In our work, we propose a fast satellite streak detection method by restricting the streak search area using the line fitting. The streak detection accuracy and speed of the proposed method is measured by conducting experiments, and we acquired accurate detection result within the shorter time than the existing method.