Automatic detection of MEO satellite streaks from single long exposure astronomic images

Nowadays, there is an increased interest in achieving an accurate surveillance of the sky, since the number of objects in Earth´s orbit (active satellites and debris) is continuously increasing. The satellites constantly need to be supervised in order to notice their deviations from their trajectories and update their coordinates. This paper presents a new method for satellite detection in 2D astronomic images acquired with a cheap, easy to set up optical surveillance system. The proposed method use the Radon Transform in order to identify satellite strikes in images followed by a set of decision rules to decide whether the streak is a satellite or not. The method was tested on multiple sequences of astronomic images, and was found to have a very high detection rate, along with a very low false positive rate.