A maximum projection and particle filtering algorithm for space debris detection

An algorithm was proposed to detect the space debris in the optical astronomical images. Maximum Projection was induced to reduce the data amount in the three dimensional space. When the space debris was detected, it was tracked by the particle filter thus the precise location information can be got at any time. The simulation results show that the method can perfectly meet the requirement of the space debris detection with a high accuracy (RMS error less than 1 pixel) and detection probability, and a low false alarm rejection