Compressive sensing for small moving space object detection in astronomical images

It is known that detecting small moving objects in as- tronomical image sequences is a significant research problem in space surveillance. The new theory, compressive sensing, pro- vides a very easy and computationally cheap coding scheme for onboard astronomical remote sensing. An algorithm for small moving space object detection and localization is proposed. The algorithm determines the measurements of objects by comparing the difference between the measurements of the current image and the measurements of the background scene. In contrast to reconstruct the whole image, only a foreground image is recon- structed, which will lead to an effective computational performance, and a high level of localization accuracy is achieved. Experiments and analysis are provided to show the performance of the pro- posed approach on detection and localization.

Super-resolution reconstruction of astronomical images using time-scale adaptive normalized convolution

In this work, we describe a new multiframe Super-Resolution（SR） framework based on time-scale adaptive Normalized Convolution（NC）, and apply it to astronomical images. The method mainly uses the conceptual basis of NC where each neighborhood of a signal is expressed in terms of the corresponding subspace expanded by the chosen polynomial basis function. Instead of the conventional NC, the introduced spatially adaptive filtering kernel is utilized as the applicability function of shape-adaptive NC, which fits the local image structure information including shape and orientation. This makes it possible to obtain image patches with the same modality,which are collected for polynomial expansion to maximize the signal-to-noise ratio and suppress aliasing artifacts across lines and edges. The robust signal certainty takes the confidence value at each point into account before a local polynomial expansion to minimize the influence of outliers.Finally, the temporal scale applicability is considered to omit accurate motion estimation since it is easy to result in annoying registration errors in real astronomical applications. Excellent SR reconstruction capability of the time-scale adaptive NC is demonstrated through fundamental experiments on both synthetic images and real astronomical images when compared with other SR reconstruction methods.

Reconstruction and transmission of astronomical image based on compressed sensing

In the process of image transmission, the famous JPEG and JPEG-2000 compression methods need more transmission time as it is difficult for them to compress the image with a low compression rate. Recently the compressed sensing（CS） theory was proposed, which has earned great concern as it can compress an image with a low compression rate, meanwhile the original image can be perfectly reconstructed from only a few compressed data. The CS theory is used to transmit the high resolution astronomical image and build the simulation environment where there is communication between the satellite and the Earth. Number experimental results show that the CS theory can effectively reduce the image transmission and reconstruction time. Even with a very low compression rate, it still can recover a higher quality astronomical image than JPEG and JPEG-2000 compression methods.

Astronomical image restoration using variational Bayesian blind deconvolution

An algorithm is presented for image prior combinations based blind deconvolution and applied to astronomical images.Using a hierarchical Bayesian framework, the unknown original image and all required algorithmic parameters are estimated simultaneously. Through utilization of variational Bayesian analysis,approximations of the posterior distributions on each unknown are obtained by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler(KL) distance, thus providing uncertainties of the estimates during the restoration process. Experimental results on both synthetic images and real astronomical images demonstrate that the proposed approaches compare favorably to other state-of-the-art reconstruction methods.

A phase model for point spread function estimation in ground-based astronomy

In ground-based astronomy, images of objects in outer space are acquired via ground-based tele- scopes. However, the imaging system is generally interfered by atmospheric turbulence and hence images so acquired are blurred with unknown point spread function （PSF）. To restore the observed images, aberration of the wavefront at the telescope＇s aperture, i.e., the phase, is utilized to derive the PSF. However, the phase is not readily available. Instead, its gradients can be collected by wavefront sensors. Thus the usual approach is to use regularization methods to reconstruct high-resolution phase gradients and then use them to recover the phase in high accuracy. Here, we develop a model that reconstructs the phase directly. The proposed model uses the tight frame regularization and it can be solved efficiently by the Douglas-Rachford alternating direction method of multipliers whose convergence has been well established. Numerical results illustrate that our new model is efficient and gives more accurate estimation for the PSF.