Computer Science Department, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, Memorandumului 28, Cluj-Napoca 400114, Romania.
Romanian Academy, Astronomical Observatory Cluj-Napoca, Cireşilor 19, Cluj-Napoca 400487, Romania.
Sensors (Basel). 2014 Feb 11;14(2):2703-31. doi: 10.3390/s140202703.
The space around the Earth is filled with man-made objects, which orbit the planet at altitudes ranging from hundreds to tens of thousands of kilometers. Keeping an eye on all objects in Earth's orbit, useful and not useful, operational or not, is known as Space Surveillance. Due to cost considerations, the space surveillance solutions beyond the Low Earth Orbit region are mainly based on optical instruments. This paper presents a solution for real-time automatic detection and ranging of space objects of altitudes ranging from below the Medium Earth Orbit up to 40,000 km, based on two low cost observation systems built using commercial cameras and marginally professional telescopes, placed 37 km apart, operating as a large baseline stereovision system. The telescopes are pointed towards any visible region of the sky, and the system is able to automatically calibrate the orientation parameters using automatic matching of reference stars from an online catalog, with a very high tolerance for the initial guess of the sky region and camera orientation. The difference between the left and right image of a synchronized stereo pair is used for automatic detection of the satellite pixels, using an original difference computation algorithm that is capable of high sensitivity and a low false positive rate. The use of stereovision provides a strong means of removing false positives, and avoids the need for prior knowledge of the orbits observed, the system being able to detect at the same time all types of objects that fall within the measurement range and are visible on the image.
地球周围的空间充满了人造物体，它们以从数百公里到数万公里的高度环绕地球运行。监测地球轨道上所有有用和无用的、运行中和不运行的物体，被称为空间监视。由于成本考虑，中地球轨道以外的空间监视解决方案主要基于光学仪器。本文提出了一种基于两个低成本观测系统的解决方案，该系统使用商业摄像机和边缘专业望远镜构建，放置在相距 37 公里的地方，作为一个大基线立体视觉系统，用于实时自动检测和测距从近地轨道以下到 40,000 公里范围内的空间物体。望远镜指向天空的任何可见区域，系统能够使用来自在线目录的自动匹配参考星自动校准方位参数，对天空区域和相机方位的初始猜测具有很高的容忍度。使用左右同步立体对的差异来自动检测卫星像素，使用一种原始的差异计算算法，该算法具有高灵敏度和低误报率。立体视觉提供了一种强大的去除误报的手段，并且不需要事先了解观测到的轨道，系统能够同时检测到落入测量范围内并在图像上可见的所有类型的物体。
