Generic method for real-time satellite detection using optical acquisition systems

The number of space debris has increased tremendously in the last decade, arousing the interest of the experts in the field. The surveillance of the space is a first step in monitoring the traffic of floating objects and has several applications such as the correction of orbit coordinates for satellites or collision avoidance. An improved and flexible framework for real-time detection of satellites using a cheap optical surveillance system is proposed in this paper. The detection method is based on the Radon Transform. The satellite candidates resulted after processing the Radon space are validated by imposing constraints over the satellites length and brightness, and over the stereo matching. We additionally propose a parallel approach for Radon transform on GPU in order to fulfill the real-time constraints. We test our method on a large and variate data set, containing satellites from different orbit ranges, namely medium and high orbits. A high accuracy over 95% was obtained in average for real time satellites detection with minimal false positives.