Processing of Space Monitoring Information

Observation of near-Earth outer space is an important task for astronomers and scientists at the present time. This task is to determine the coordinate and non-coordinate characteristics of artificial space objects. According to data obtained, a catalogue of objects is created, which should be maintained and updated. For this, optical means (telescopes) can be involved. The data from these means should be processed in order to obtain information about objects in space.

In this course, we will talk about steps that should be done to detect satellites and estimate their parameters with the methods of background suppression, detection of isolated groups of bright pixels to classify them as stars or tracks. One of the items includes information about star catalogues and the astrometric reduction of the image. The examples of images in different observation conditions will be shown. Usually, during observation, a sequence of images is done and it is important to define the mutual displacement of images for suppressing the spatially correlated background. One more topic for discussion is spatiotemporal methods of filtering observation background and further extraction of spatially resolved point objects from the image.