An Efficient Object Detection Method For Large CCD Astronomical Images

In astronomy, the charge coupled device (CCD) images obtained from celestial observations are usually stored in flexible image transport system (FITS) format and the sizes of such images are usually very large, 8 megabytes or more being no unusual. Moreover, the amount of such images is very great due to continuous celestial observations. So the demand of real time processing of these large images is challenging. This paper proposes an efficient method to detect objects, which is an important step in astronomical image processing, by designing a scan accelerator and a recursive measure routine. Experimental results show that this method is very fast and accurate in detecting and measuring objects. In addition, this method is easy to implement and can be applied to other related fields.