Automatic Detecting and Tracking Space Debris Objects Using Active Contours from Astronomical Images

We present an efficient and low-cost method for automatically detecting and tracking of the space debris objects from astronomical images,by using a combination of active contours and shape feature similarities.An object detection algorithm is firstly implemented following some image preprocessing steps,in order to locate all the major objects in each image.Next,an object tracking method based on Greedy Snake algorithm is proposed so that all the detected objects are able to be correctly tracked.Finally,the space debris in the image sequence is identified by applying a shape feature similarity matching operation.Experimental results are also illustrated to demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed method to perform correct space debris tracking.