Development of Motion Trackers for Space Debris Research

Abstract

Space debris are dysfunctional artificial objects that are orbiting around the earth. Miniaturization and advancement in space technology have encouraged the increase in the number of small-satellite constellations. Over the years, in-orbit catastrophic events have resulted in an exponential increase in space pollution with the ever-expanding coverage area of space debris. An international consortium of private institutions and space agencies works together to address the concern by extensive research and development related to active debris tracking and removal methods. On the same grounds, the Institute of Technical Physics of German Aerospace Center is developing ground based high energy laser facility and optical instruments to track and remove space debris from Low Earth Orbit. The internship project aims to develop a motion tracker software to track the sample in a technology demonstration experiment of impulse generation through laser-matter interaction. Several object detection and motion tracking algorithms in computer vision were reviewed and analyzed to accomplish it. For object detection, Harris Corner Detector and Scale Invariant Feature Transform algorithms exhibit a decent success rate. Optical flow point based tracking was most promising to obtain a 3-Dimensional sample track specifically in a multi-view camera configuration. The reference data files used for software development are the high-speed videos originally obtained during the laser-matter interaction experiment throughout the project.