Algorithms and applications for detecting faint space debris in GEO

•An automatic image processing pipeline is developed to detect space debris in GEO.•Our method detects faint object based on multi-frame.•Performance of our method is tested based on raw CCD images and the resultant catalogue is obtained.

The GEO region is a kind of unique and precious resource, it is of great importance to prevent space debris collisions in this region. Surveying space debris in GEO and extracting the relevant information automatically are rather challenging tasks due to several factors. Here we present an image processing pipeline which detects GEO objects automatically and improves the detection ability for faint objects. In our pipeline the mathematical morphology operator is adopted to eliminate noises and perform image restoration, then the median is used to eliminate the influences of field stars and extract object positions. The pipeline is tested on a large number of raw CCD images, and the tracklets obtained are correlated and catalogued, finally the effectiveness and the efficiency are demonstrated and proved by the results.