Automated object detection for astronomical images

Sonny Orellana; Lei Zhao; Helen Boussalis; Charles Liu; Khosrow Rad; Jane Dong

doi:10.1117/12.631033

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24 October 2005 Automated object detection for astronomical images

Sonny Orellana, Lei Zhao, Helen Boussalis, Charles Liu, Khosrow Rad, Jane Dong

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Proceedings Volume 6015, Multimedia Systems and Applications VIII; 60150Y (2005) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.631033
Event: Optics East 2005, 2005, Boston, MA, United States

Abstract

Sponsored by the National Aeronautical Space Association (NASA), the Synergetic Education and Research in Enabling NASA-centered Academic Development of Engineers and Space Scientists (SERENADES) Laboratory was established at California State University, Los Angeles (CSULA). An important on-going research activity in this lab is to develop an easy-to-use image analysis software with the capability of automated object detection to facilitate astronomical research. This paper presented a fast object detection algorithm based on the characteristics of astronomical images. This algorithm consists of three steps. First, the foreground and background are separated using histogram-based approach. Second, connectivity analysis is conducted to extract individual object. The final step is post processing which refines the detection results. To improve the detection accuracy when some objects are blocked by clouds, top-hat transform is employed to split the sky into cloudy region and non-cloudy region. A multi-level thresholding algorithm is developed to select the optimal threshold for different regions. Experimental results show that our proposed approach can successfully detect the blocked objects by clouds.

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Sonny Orellana, Lei Zhao, Helen Boussalis, Charles Liu, Khosrow Rad, and Jane Dong "Automated object detection for astronomical images", Proc. SPIE 6015, Multimedia Systems and Applications VIII, 60150Y (24 October 2005); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.631033

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