The Astronomical Journal, 130:19511960, 2005 October

# 2005. The American Astronomical Society. All rights reserved. Printed in U.S.A.

MATCHED FILTER PROCESSING FOR ASTEROID DETECTION

Peter S. Gural
Science Applications International Corporation, 4501 Daly Drive, Suite 400, Chantilly, VA 20151; peter.s.gural@saic.com

and
1

Jeffrey A. Larsen and Arianna E. Gleason 2

Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, University of Arizona, 1629 East University Boulevard, Tucson, AZ 85721;
larsen@usna.edu, arianna@eps.berkeley.edu
Received 2004 March 9; accepted 2005 June 13

ABSTRACT
Matched filter (MF) processing has been shown to provide significant performance gains when processing stellar
imagery used for asteroid detection, recovery, and tracking. This includes extending detection ranges to fainter
magnitudes at the noise limit of the imagery and operating in dense cluttered star fields as encountered at low Galactic
latitudes. The MF software has been shown to detect 40% more asteroids in high-quality Spacewatch imagery relative
to the currently implemented approaches, which are based on moving target indicator (MTI) algorithms. In addition,
MF detections were made in dense star fields and in situations in which the asteroid was collocated with a star in an
image frame, cases in which the MTI algorithms failed. Thus, using legacy sensors and optics, improved detection
sensitivity is achievable by simply upgrading the image-processing stream. This in turn permits surveys of the nearEarth asteroid (NEA) population farther from opposition, for smaller sizes, and in directions previously inaccessible
to current NEA search programs. A software package has been developed and made available on the NASA data
services Web site that can be used for asteroid detection and recovery operations utilizing the enhanced performance
capabilities of MF processing.
Key words: methods: data analysis minor planets, asteroids techniques: image processing

1. INTRODUCTION

NEA detection rates via software, using legacy telescope systems

and detectors.
Asteroid detection can be characterized as searching for moving targets in a star-cluttered background. Due to the short timescales between exposures, asteroids can be assumed to maintain
a fairly constant intensity and follow a uniform-velocity, linear
track across the field of view. The background star clutter has a
spatial frequency content similar to that of the asteroids, along
with an underlying noise component that can depend on pixel
value and star scintillation. Local and global levels of the background can change with time due to variable seeing conditions
during multiple exposures. All these effects must be dealt with
to maximize the probability of detection for the surveying system. This paper attempts to address these aspects and is broken
into several parts covering the MF detection formulation, imageprocessing steps, and finally a discussion on performance results
on several data sets covering a variety of NEA detection issues.
The software developed for this work is entitled SALTAD (SAIC
Algorithm Test Bed for Asteroid Detection) and comprises a set
of C function modules that were used to explore various imageprocessing algorithms during the course of this development.
It has been tested extensively on the archived imagery of the
University of Arizonas Spacewatch project. A current version of
the software is available from the NASA data services Web site
or from the authors.

The detection of near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) has taken on

special significance for both NASA and the general public in recent years. Clearly, the need to measure and catalog all potential
Earth impactors to avoid a global catastrophe is of paramount
concern to humankind and is reflected in NASAs goal to discover 90% of NEAs measuring 1 km or larger by 2008. When
this paper was written it had been estimated that just over half of
that goal had been achieved, but now the search will get more
difficult, as the larger and brighter objects have already been
discovered (Jedicke et al. 2003).
To push the discovery rate along at a greater rate, a larger
volume of space needs to be surveyed to a deeper limiting magnitude. Although improving the limiting magnitude of the telescopic systems used is not an absolute requirement for the larger
planet-killer surveys (area or sky coverage has been emphasized), having a fainter detection limit allows one to discover and
track asteroids farther from solar opposition and/or farther in
distance from the Earth. Improving the limiting magnitude of
detection also leads one into the next phase of the surveys, that is,
the discovery of smaller NEAs down to a size of 100 m across,
which can produce significant destruction on a regional scale. In
addition, being able to survey regions of space currently avoided
by the NEA survey teams (i.e., densely cluttered star fields around
the Milky Way) would also help in opening up the volumetric coverage needed to enhance asteroid detection probabilities. These
issues are what provided the motivation to develop, test, and field
a matched filter (MF) image-processing procedure to increase

2. MATCHED FILTER FORMULATION

The systematic detection of NEAs has grown in scope and
sophistication since the first Spacewatch project survey techniques of Rabinowitz (1991) using a 0.91 m telescope, drift scanning, and simple change detection algorithms. Currently, surveys
are being performed by the Spacewatch team in Tucson, the
Lincoln Near Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project in New

1
Current address: Department of Physics, United States Naval Academy,
Annapolis, MD 21401.
2
Current address: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Department
of Earth and Planetary Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720.

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GURAL, LARSEN, & GLEASON

Mexico, the Lowell Observatory Near Earth Object Survey

(LONEOS) system in Flagstaff, and the Near Earth Asteroid
Tracking (NEAT) project on Maui and Palomar. While CCD
sensitivities have improved and larger aperture instruments have
been brought to bear on the NEA problem, the basic tenet of using
moving target indicator (MTI) techniques and/or thresholding on
every image frame and forming an object/cluster map remains
with us today. The reason is simple: MTI algorithms are easy to
implement, can be made fairly robust to image artifacts, and are
computationally very fast compared to other more sophisticated
algorithms. Thus, detection lists of newly found objects are available to the asteroid hunter literally moments after the last image
frame has been collected. Since it is desirable to do same-night
reimaging of newly detected, high angle rate NEAs in order to
refine their orbital elements sufficiently to ensure next-night recovery, waiting for the following night is sometimes not a viable
option. Thus, short-term recovery operations, computational resource limitations, and a legacy of obtaining quick-look results
drives the philosophy to continue using fast but less sensitive
computational methods.
Data for asteroid detection typically involve multiple (three to
five) two-dimensional spatial images taken over a sequence of
known time steps. Current NEA search techniques essentially
process each collected image frame separately by thresholding each image to form lists of objects and their positions. These
lists either are compared on a frame-by-frame basis to weed out
common objects (Spacewatch), are compared with a star catalog
to eliminate known objects (LONEOS), or have the background
suppressed prior to object cluster formation (LINEAR). In all
cases the remaining set of unique objects within each frame
are then tested with a velocity matching technique that looks
for any objects shifting in a linear fashion across the temporal
sequence of frames. It should be noted that this is not matched
filtering as defined in the signal processing community but a
technique referred to as detect-before-track. This method of
frame-by-frame thresholding followed by a velocity match is
currently employed by all the NEA facilities and is characterized
by its extremely fast processing and low memory requirements,
and has thus been well suited to the computational hardware
available in the past. However, Moores Law has provided ever
increasing CPU speeds and the availability of low cost clusters of
small computers, permitting one to consider more sophisticated
and computationally intensive image-processing solutions to
NEA detection and tracking.
The MF techniques described herein fall into a class of algorithms referred to as track-before-detect or multiple hypothesis testing. Essentially, they attempt to integrate up signal
energy based on a hypothesis of the targets spatial-temporal
signature. In the case of asteroid detection, this involves summing the imagery across several frames, after hypothesizing a
preselected motion speed and direction and shifting and stacking
the frames appropriately. If the motion is fast enough, the asteroid can also smear across a single frame, and so a spatial sum
can be attempted along the trail in the direction of motion to
provide addition signal gain. The multiframe sum in space and
time is then thresholded to find the objects that match the hypothesized motion. This is repeated for every realizable motion
hypothesis that an asteroid could take in the imagery. As the
position, speed, and direction of undiscovered asteroids are
unknown, the size of the hypothesis set grows dramatically in an
asteroid search program, as does the associated computational
load. This last point is why MF processing has not been a viable
option until just recently. In addition, the image-processing steps
involve storing a large number of intermediate imagery prod-

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ucts (mean and mean-subtracted imagery, covariance estimates,

whitened data frames, stacked imagery, and noise estimates)
that require significant amounts of computer memory. With
modern PCs and careful implementation of the MF algorithms,
both the computational run time and memory usage limits are
now no longer significant issues preventing the use of such
algorithms.
The MF algorithm incorporated into the SALTAD software
was based on the formulation originally presented by Mohanty
(1981), who first applied this technique to satellite detection in
background star fields. It is generally considered to be an optimal
detection method in idealized environments with known noise
characterization and a priori knowledge of the spatial-temporal
signal behavior. Published variants and enhancements of this
general approach have been reported in the literature by Kelly
(1986), Barniv (1985), Barniv & Kella (1987), Lampropoulos &
Boulter (1987), Reed et al. (1988), Pohlig (1989, 1992), Chen
(1989), Porat & Friedlander (1990), Auerbach et al. (1996),
Ralston et al. (1996), Watson & Watson (1997), and SandersReed (1998). The basic methodology involves a two-step algorithm in which the first stage performs mean removal and
background clutter suppression, followed by a second stage incorporating an adaptive MF and detector to enhance the signal
component. Information about the individual preprocessing,
intermediate, and postprocessing steps is reviewed in greater
detail in x 3 as it pertains to the SALTAD software implementation for NEA detection. At this point, the discussion follows
the more general Mohanty (1981) formalism for MF detection,
and the reader can refer to his paper for the finer details.
Given a sequence of image frames V(k) for time index k
1, : : : , N (the use of bold italic symbols herein represents twodimensional spatial pixels in images that have been lexigraphically reordered), one forms an image mean hV i to be used for the
removal of stationary and nonfluctuating image components
across the field of view for all time steps. The mean-subtracted
data V(k)
hV i, however, can typically have a locally changing
noise variance (e.g., due to star scintillation, hot pixels, or spatialtemporal changing sensitivity and seeing), and thus, a whitening step is usually applied to achieve a more uniform noise level
across the scene. To whiten the data, the second-order noise statistics of the imagery is obtained through the estimation of the
noise covariance matrix R. Applying the root-inverse of the noise
covariance to the mean-subtracted data provides the whitened
(clutter suppressed) imagery through the application of equation (1) at each time step k:
whitened image frame R
1=2 V k
hV i:

To form the MF, a spacetime template T(k) of the signal signature must be hypothesized. This can include the effects of motion
within a frames collection period, motion between frames, and
the signal intensity fluctuations. For an unresolved, constantvelocity, uniform-intensity target this can be formulated as a
single pixel set to a signal value in a given frame with a linear
spatial displacement occurring temporally across frames. This is
the simplest model that is applicable to asteroid searches and one
that works well for NEA detection. The signal template must also
be whitened by the same noise covariance used previously, thus
producing R
1/2T(k). Dropping the temporal index k, the generalized MF output can then be simply written with the full
covariance inverse as
M T H R
1 V
hV i;

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MATCHED FILTER ASTEROID DETECTION

For detection, the MF is scaled by a normalization term,

namely, T HR
1T, and the ratio TRT as expressed in equation (3)
is a signal-dependent test relative to some threshold
that yields
an acceptable false-alarm rate:
TRT

M
>
:
T H R
1 T

The signal intensity is another unknown that would need to

be hypothesized along with the asteroids position, speed, and
direction. To avoid the additional computational burden from hypothesizing a wide range of signal levels, the MF detector is very
often formulated with a squared numerator, applying a constantintensity assumption (in space and time) to make the resulting
ratio TRTSQ independent of signal brightness (see eq. [4]):
 H
1
2
T R V
hV i
;
4
TRTSQ
T H R
1 T
or alternatively using a maximum likelihood estimate
MLE

M 2
>
;
Var(M )

as was selected for the first-pass SALTAD detection processing.

Thus the MF output is used in a constant false-alarm rate (CFAR)
style detector, where the denominator is replaced by a local variance estimate of the MF statistic in a region around the pixel
under test (see eq. [5]). For example, either a localized donut region or even a global estimate could be used. For an unresolved
point target covering a single pixel per frame, the variance estimate from each individual frame could also be simply shifted
and stacked (via the template operator T ) in a variety of ways.
Some implementations that were tried were found to be successful and highly computationally efficient.
As the intensity-independent form of the MF (eq. [4] or [5])
can suffer false alarms from bright, multiple targets in the same
field of view (as typically occurs in asteroid imagery), this test
is used only as a first-pass screener before applying the more
robust signal-dependent test of equation (3). Given a handful
of first-pass detections arising from equation (5) and knowing
the associated motion hypothesis used, the signal intensity can
be estimated from the data, and the signal-dependent form of
equation (3) can be generated for a dramatically reduced number
of test points. Final screening algorithms can also be applied in a
postprocessing mode to help mitigate the false-alarm rate.
3. IMAGE-PROCESSING STREAM
FUNCTIONALITY AND ISSUES
The SALTAD software is an implementation of the clutter
suppression and matched filtering processes very generally described in x 2. The software was designed as a test bed that
allowed the development and testing of various algorithmic formulations in an end-to-end processing scenario. Many of the details that result in a successful application of MF processing to
NEA detection are discussed in the next few subsections. What
follows is a module-by-module description of the most successful algorithms used during the software development, as well as
suggestions for improvement and issues that arose. It should be
pointed out that the LINEAR image processing stream as described in Viggh et al. (1998) and Stokes et al. (2000) is very
similar to the preprocessing and clutter suppression in the sections that follow. We attempt, however, to describe the methodology in far greater detail, as it is a necessary and integral part

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of the follow-up processing steps involving matched filtering

and detection. We do this because MF processing has not been
applied in asteroid search programs to date. To minimize the size
of this paper, various imagery examples generated through each
stage of the processing have not been included but can be found
instead in Gural (2003), published as a NASA technical report.
3.1. Preprocessing
The first step in processing any imagery is to input and store in
computer memory the multiframe sequence of data. For SALTAD,
a FITS file format interface was developed to be compatible
with reading the Spacewatch data archives. In addition, a simple yet uniform C language data structure for the imagery was
developed that could be used consistently at any product stage
in the processing stream. This allowed for a simple and uniform
interface between each processing module.
Given a sequence of raw imagery stored in system memory,
one must preprocess the data to remove pixel artifacts, register
the frames spatially, and equalize the background intensities. No
capability was incorporated into SALTAD for image cleanup,
but the removal of bright pixel singletons and other image flaws
and artifacts can go a long way to mitigating false-alarm detection in the final processing stages. Once cleaned, the imagery
sequence needs to be registered to align the frames spatially. For
stellar imagery this can be readily accomplished, as known star
positions provide well-localized tie points for registration algorithms. Due to the small field of view typically encountered in
asteroid searches, a quadratic warp-fitting function was found
adequate for the interpolation necessary to create a set of registered frames. Remapping with a second-order warp in conjunction with subpixel stellar centroiding accuracy yielded the best
performance in the later processing stages involving matched
filtering. Registration is a critical area for MF processing, as misregistration causes signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) loss; thus, even
higher order registration techniques and using Lagrange or sinc
function interpolation are highly recommended, although they
were not tried during this project.
A critical area of preprocessing that is not documented in the
MF literature involves the need to equalize the imagery. To address changes in frame-to-frame signal level from variable seeing
or integration time, the frames must be normalized to obtain the
same generalized signal and background counts. This was most
successfully implemented using a local background estimator
(starless mean), with each frame scaled to achieve the same level
as a reference frame (first image). The starless mean was found by
forming the mean and standard deviation of a region of pixels,
removing those pixels in the next iteration that were greater than
2  from the mean, and repeating the procedure until convergence.
Typically, only three iterations were necessary to obtain a good
starless background estimate for each frame, which was then
scaled relative to the reference background of the first frame.
3.2. Clutter Suppression
As indicated in equation (1), to whiten the imagery a mean
image must be removed from the sequence of image frames. Due
to the high spatial frequency content of the star fields, spatially
averaging the nearest neighboring pixels (averaging in both
space and time) does not perform well at eliminating stationary
objects such as stars and galaxies in the field. Instead, a temporalonly average should be formed, which can be problematic when
there are very few frames available. Also, the presence of the
asteroid in the very frames one is using to estimate the mean
causes a loss in S/N when the mean is removed from each frame

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GURAL, LARSEN, & GLEASON

(known as signal capture loss). The successful solution is to use

only that subset of frames that does not include the target signal.
This is done by eliminating from the temporal average for each
spatial pixel the frame with that pixels highest value (assuming
that the highest pixel in time contains the signal) and averaging
the remaining frames. This procedure is suboptimal, as it tends to
underestimate the mean, resulting in incomplete star and background removal, but it is found to work far better than other
simple averaging techniques.
With the mean removed from each temporal frame, the secondorder noise statistics must be estimated to form a noise covariance matrix. Several approaches were tried, including attempts to
model any nearest-neighbor spatial and/or temporal correlations
in the noise. Most performed no better than a fully uncorrelated
assumption, which yields a diagonal covariance matrix. The variance of a given pixel using its 3 ; 3 nearest neighbors and N time
frames (again with the brightest pixel removed) forms an estimate
of the covariances diagonal element representing the variance of
that pixel. Inversion of the covariance becomes a simple procedure, as does application of the inverse to the mean-subtracted
data. The resulting whitened data set suppresses regions of high
variance in the field such as around scintillating stars, noisy pixels,
or poorly mean-subtracted regions.
The next step involves the hypothesis of a motion model for
the asteroid and the formation of the MF output. This is typically
followed by the convolution of the system point-spread function
(PSF) across the field prior to detection testing. To save computation time, one can perform the PSF convolution directly on
the whitened data so that it need not be repeated for each hypothesis. This can be done only if the asteroid can be assumed to
be unresolved in the imagery (represented by a single pixel at
each time step). For asteroid searches this is usually the case and
was the assumption made in the current release of SALTAD.
This decision was made because it reduces run-time costs in two
ways. First, with the PSF convolution operation pulled outside
the hypothesis loop, which can involve several thousand motion
templates, lower computational loading is achieved for no loss in
performance. Second, even if the asteroid is trailed spatially, one
can still detect it with a point motion model because of the gain
obtained by integrating temporally across frames (although suboptimally, since we are lacking the spatial integration gain).
Typically, the spatial integration would help enhance an extremely faint trailed object, but the human operator would have
a difficult time verifying its existence by visual inspection. In
addition, one could take advantage of the significant reduction in
the number of required speed hypotheses that occurs for fast
trailed objects, as pointed out by Chen (1989). Essentially, as an
object moves with a higher apparent angular rate, its trail in a
given frame becomes longer, and the next speed hypothesis can
take a jump of several pixels per frame rather than the fraction of
a pixel per frame normally used. Reducing the hypothesis set
through exponentially expanding speed increments and lowering
the computational load within the hypothesis loop are two of the
more significant contributions to obtaining reasonable run times
on modern PCs.
3.3. Matched Filter Processing
To carry out MF processing, a set of hypothesis templates
must be formed that span the realizable possibilities of asteroid
position, speed, and direction. For ground-based asteroid searches,
in which the time between frames is usually less than an hour,
the motion can be well approximated by a linearly propagating
track. Curvature can come into play if the time span is on the
order of a day (due to Earths motion relative to the asteroid)

Vol. 130

Fig. 1.Baseline detection performance of the MF algorithm of SALTAD as

a function of the hypothesis step size. The open and gray bars correspond to new
detections, whereas the black bars are MF detections that matched previously
found MTI Spacewatch detections.

or in a space-based search system, which induces parallax effects due to the satellites motion around the Earth. SALTAD is
currently implemented with only a linear motion hypothesis
but could be upgraded to include more complicated motion
effects.
Given the linear motion template and assuming an unresolved
point target, the MF formulation simply reduces to a shift and
stack operation in the spacetime domain. That is, each frame is
simply shifted in the two spatial dimensions relative to the first
frame by an amount corresponding to the hypothesized motion
shift for that frame. Each shifted frame is then added to a running
sum frame that produces the MF output of equation (2). Note that
the frames used are the whitened-PSF-convolved data set. To
actually shift the frames, another interpolation is required to remap the imagery at each time step. For this stage the algorithms
used were nearest neighbor and bilinear interpolation. Half-pixel
step sizes for the lowest speed hypothesis were found to produce
the greatest detection performance, as seen in Figure 1, but increasing this to full pixel steps resulted in a loss of only 10% in
the numbers of asteroids found in the imagery. Full-pixel shifts
are desirable from a computational standpoint since the shifting
and stacking operation involves no interpolation (simple address
shift to align frames) and is thus a very significant run-time
advantage. Note that subpixel shifting with bilinear interpolation
is an option in the SALTAD package if run-time performance is
not a limiting factor.
An alternative to spatial shifting and stacking is to do spatial Fourier processing on the sequence of images (take twodimensional fast Fourier transforms of each image). The linear
motion of an object in Fourier space appears as a plane of energy
at a different angle relative to the background clutter. Applying
the motion hypothesis template in the Fourier domain is a simple matter of taking the point-by-point product of the Fouriertransformed hypothesis template with the Fourier-transformed
images and inverse transforming, getting the integrated signal
energy for all asteroid starting positions. For a limited hypothesis
set and large dimensional spatial imagery, this can be a computational advantage. At this time, however, SALTAD does not
support this mode of processing.
Given the MF output, a first-pass test for detection is made
using the maximum likelihood detector form of equation (5). In
this case a CFAR detector is used, where a donut region around
the pixel under test is used to form a variance estimate locally.
The MF output of the pixel squared is then tested for whether it
exceeds a user-defined factor applied to the variance. If this threshold is passed, the robust detection parameter of equation (3) is

No. 4, 2005

MATCHED FILTER ASTEROID DETECTION

Fig. 2.Detections and false alarms for the two detection statistics TRT and
MLE on a sample Spacewatch data set. Crosses show false alarms, filled circles
show new MF detections, and open circles show MF detections that were also
MTI detections.

computed by estimating the signal strength once the track has

been localized. It has been found that combining the two test
statistics into a single cost function to make the final detection
decision yields the best performance of detection probability
versus false-alarm rate (see the example in Fig. 2). Currently,
applying a threshold using the expression shown in equation (6),
which combines the outputs of equations (3) and (5), has produced a good detection cost function:
0:37MLE 0:93TRT > threshold:

The threshold is set by the asteroid hunter/operator to control

the degree of false alarms tolerated in a postprocessing human
screening.
3.4. Postprocessing and Run-Time Efficiencies
As the detected asteroids approach closer in signal energy to
the noise background, a higher percentage of false alarms leak
through, as with any detector. To help mitigate some of these, a
postdetection screening of the tracks is made in software prior to
final reporting. This is done by culling out those detected trails
that do not possess a reasonably constant light curve, as is assumed for most asteroid tracks measured over short time frames.
Tests are made back at the individual frame-to-frame imagery
level to examine signal levels once the target position and track
are known and localized in spacetime. Thus, some a priori information about the spatial-temporal characteristics of real asteroid
light curves can be of significant importance. A declustering step
is also applied to eliminate nearest-neighbor detections of the
same asteroid, as well as a detection list culling step after each
hypothesis is completed to eliminate common asteroid detections from similar but not identical hypothesis models.
In the case of Spacewatch operations, a human-in-the-loop
does an additional final scan to determine the validity of any
software-discovered asteroids through a visual inspection. It has
been noted that the MF processing capabilities have pushed the
detection limit so close to the noise floor that it is becoming more
difficult for operators to confidently validate software-based asteroid detections based on visual cues alone. Ultimately, this
could be the limiting factor in how many fainter asteroids are
actually found for a given system sensitivity.

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To create a software package that could perform adequately on

a modern 2 GHz PC, a number of computational inefficiencies
were addressed relative to the initial proof-of-concept implementation. Most of the array-processing modules have been rewritten
to be more highly optimized in code. For example, specific routines were generated for three, four, or five image frames with
efficient pointer-style addressing in addition to those functions
for a generic number of N frames. Instead of computing standard
deviations via square root operations or thresholds in decibels
via logarithmic operations, the formulations were rewritten to
avoid these function evaluations, which can be computational
hogs. All the high-bandwidth data processing currently involves
only floating point additions and multiplications, with division
operations shunned whenever possible. Finally, sorting processes
were reformulated to more efficiently cull out nearly identical hypothesis detections and remove multiple finds of the same asteroid. Each step of the processing chain was reviewed and revised
where significant run-time issues appeared. The resulting improvement in run time from the initial implementation was on the
order of a factor of 8, with no loss in detection performance. In
addition, restricting the hypothesis speed steps to integer shifts
(rather than half-pixel steps) improved run time by an additional
factor of 4, with only a modest 10% loss in detection efficiency.
The approximate run time on a single PC for processing
three frames of 2K ; 2K imagery was 10 minutes using a 2 GHz
class Pentium IV, which for an archived Spacewatch image of
48 million pixels in size would require 2 hr to process. This was
considered to be approaching a usable range of processing time.
Since the algorithm is embarrassingly parallelizable by working subimages on separate processors, implementation on a networked cluster of PCs (e.g., Beowulf cluster) would allow for
near real-time output of detection lists. Run-time numbers using
the newly installed Spacewatch Beowulf cluster were 5 minutes
with four 1.2 GHz Pentium III processors per 2K ; 2K subimage. (Pentium III processors are used because they run cooler
at high-elevation observatories, where the thin atmosphere affects their cooling capacity.)
One issue with matched filtering in normal NEA search operations is that the first detections are not available until the last
image has been collected. So, unlike MTI, in which each image
is processed immediately after collection and the final unique
object list is processed for velocity matching as a last step, the
MF begins its processing only after the final image collection in a
data sequence. Thus, there will be a time lag before first detection
reports are available, but a second image set can be collected
while the first is being processed. This will require a change in
the daily operations procedures for some NEA survey sites that
may employ the MF mode of processing with a limited amount
of computing resources.
4. DETECTION PERFORMANCE RESULTS
As part of the SALTAD software development project at the
Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), there was
a performance assessment done by the University of Arizonas
Spacewatch team on a wide variety of archived imagery under
varying SALTAD run parameters. The data used in this analysis included 144 frames (12 scans divided into 12 subimages)
of survey imagery from the Spacewatch 0.91 m telescope taken
under a wide variety of weather conditions, 48 frames from their
1.8 m telescope possessing different noise characteristics, and
50 recoveries collected to reacquire a previously discovered
asteroid. Evaluations were made of the overall performance
of the software in the probability of detecting asteroids, falsealarm rate, limiting magnitude capability, and ability to handle

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Vol. 130

Fig. 3.Cumulative number of detections for fainter (higher magnitude)

asteroids using the IMPACT and SALTAD processing software.

high star clutter. The following subsections discuss the first results from that analysis.
4.1. Detection Enhancement in Limiting Magnitude
In both the first-year report to NASA by Gural (2003) and the
latest performance analysis results generated by the Spacewatch
project, the SALTAD MF algorithms have demonstrated an
ability to detect a larger number of asteroids at the fainter limits
of the telescopic collection system. In a composite result of several processing scans, comparing the MF with MTI algorithms
on identical data sets, the cumulative detection of asteroids as a
function of magnitude was generated. The software used in the
comparison was the latest incarnation of the Spacewatch MTI
algorithms embodied in the software package IMPACT. For the
MF results, one of the authors (A. G.) ran the SALTAD software,
and final detection lists were screened for false alarms by visual
verification. In Figure 3 can be seen the results of several such
comparisons. Note the dramatic rise in the number of asteroids
discovered in the imagery by the MF algorithms starting near
21 mag. In total, 44% more asteroids were located in this set of
scans by the SALTAD software at a 50% false-alarm rate. By
placing the detections in histogram bins of 0.5 mag, as in Figure 4, it can be seen that the MF extends the limiting magnitude
of detection.
An exact measure of the degree of improvement is still
forthcoming but has been estimated to be nearly 1 full mag. In
fact, the effective increase in detection is nearly 100% between

Fig. 4.Histogram of detections by each software package vs. magnitude bin.

SALTAD uses the MF algorithm, and IMPACT uses an MTI algorithm.

Fig. 5.Evolution of true detections and false alarms for a single data set.
Pushing the limits to fainter asteroids shows an increasing false-alarm rate for
each new detection (flattening of the curve).

21 and 22 mag. One issue that arose is in the postdetection

verification step by the human observer. Since the MF processing has moved the detection limit closer to the noise limit of the
imagery, it has created some problems for the human analysts in
verifying the visual existence of real asteroid tracks!
To achieve these results, however, the analyst needed to screen
through a large number of false-alarm candidates. As seen in
Figure 5, for the lower curve, for which no preprocessing image
cleanup was performed, the bright asteroids (left side of curve)
were essentially free from false alarms. As the list of detections
from the MF approached the noise limit of the system, however, the increase in false alarms was substantial, reaching levels
of greater than 1 false alarm per real detection. The verification screening done by Spacewatch was stopped at a 20:1 false
alarm/true detection ratio to determine the limiting magnitude
presented in Figures 3 and 4. In reality, an analyst would stop at a
far lower false-alarm rate. For example, if a false-alarm rate of
15% of total detections were imposed on the lower curve in Figure 5, then only a modest 22% gain in MF detections would be
obtained over those found with the Spacewatch MTI software.
Further refinement in the preprocessing and postdetection
evaluation by automated means would help to screen out a greater
percentage of these false alarms. In many cases image artifacts
present in the original raw imagery are the root cause. Bright
single-pixel flares in one frame, edge-collection effects produced
by the scanning process, or CCD pixel bleed lines from bright
stars elsewhere in the field of view can and should be removed
prior to application of the image processing stream outlined in
this paper. A simple example of this is demonstrated by the upper
curve in Figure 5. The application of a hot pixel removal algorithm increased the level of true detections before the false-alarm
rate turned the curve over to the right. The net result for MF
processing with a preprocessing cleanup step was to extend the
detection improvement from 22% to 43% over that of the MTI
technique (derived from a comparison of the lower and upper
curves in Fig. 5 for a fixed 15% false-alarm rate).
In the postdetection processing, the development of an improved joint detection statistic, such as the TRT and MLE combination shown in Figure 2, would also help to separate false
alarms from detections in a more robust fashion. Figures 6, 7,

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1957

Fig. 8.Detection signal strength vs. the combined (eq. [6]) detection statistic, where black circles show detections and gray circles show false alarms.
Fig. 6.Detection signal strength vs. the MLE detection statistic, where black
circles show detections and gray circles show false alarms.

Fig. 7.Detection signal strength vs. the TRT detection statistic, where black
circles show detections and gray circles show false alarms.

and 8 respectively show how the asteroid signal strength for detections is distributed among the false alarms for the MLE-only,
TRT-only, and combined figure of merit for equation (6), where
27,000 candidates from one scan are combined into a single display. The goal is to maximize separation of the false alarms (gray
symbols) from the true detections (black symbols), since a threshold must be drawn across this distribution. Without good separation, accepting more detections by moving a threshold line results
in higher numbers of false alarms. For example, in the MLE-only
and TRT-only cases, setting a threshold (vertical line) such that all
true detections fall to the right of the threshold inadvertently also
accepts a large number of false alarms. However, greater separation of detections from false alarms is possible when one uses
some combined cost function as seen in Figure 8, in which the
thresholding vertical line avoids a large portion of the false-alarm
region of the plot. Choosing an improved detection statistic is an
area that needs to be explored further, using perhaps other outputs
from the processing. Figure 9 is similar to Figure 2 in showing
a clearer separation between true asteroids and false alarms by
working in a combined MLE and TRT space rather than in either
parameter plotted separately against signal strength.
It should be noted that the NEAT project has also collected and
archived a large sample of asteroid imagery and had supplied

Fig. 9.Separation of true detections (black circles) from false alarms (gray
circles) in TRT/MLE space.

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Fig. 10.Early Spacewatch detection in a cluttered star field using the SALTAD MF processing. The asteroid is located in the white box.

SAIC with an image set just prior to the completion of this project. The data set processed was collected on 2001 August 1 and
consisted of three frames of 4K ; 4K imagery plus the detection
list of asteroids found by the NEAT processing system software.
After processing was completed, the SALTAD software identified 26 of the 26 previously known asteroids with the addition of
five new detections, yielding a 20% improvement in detection
performance. The new detections were typically of asteroids in
the fainter range of magnitudes previously discovered by NEAT,
and the processing yielded very few false alarms. Once again, it
was found that image artifacts, in this case an image quadrant
filled with numerous hot pixels in the first collection frame, were
the cause for reduced detection sensitivity in the quarter of the
image space where they existed. However, in good-quality regions of the collected imagery, the software demonstrates improved performance on a Spacewatch-independent collection
system and also emphasizes the preprocessing removal of image
artifacts as a requirement for reliable MF processing.
4.2. Performance in Cluttered Star Fields
One claim for the MF image-processing procedure is that it
allows one to detect moving objects even in heavily cluttered
backgrounds. The gain is primarily due to the star removal procedure in the clutter suppression step prior to matched filtering.
For example, the LINEAR stream follows a similar approach for
clutter suppression that has permitted them to make observations
near the Milky Way. For an asteroid search in a stellar field, the
term heavily cluttered corresponds to dense star regions. An
MTI technique that searches for stars that appear in common
across multiple image frames will exclude an extensive portion
of the dense star field and eliminate a large percentage of asteroid
tracks due to their close proximity to the myriads of stars. The
MF clutter-suppression procedure outlined here attempts to remove the stationary background objects before searching for
moving objects of interest, followed by an enhancement of signal energy through temporal integration. The combined effects
allow for a significant performance improvement in cluttered
fields. First results of asteroid discoveries for which the asteroid
was either near or superposed on stars in the field are shown in
Figures 10 and 11. In each case the MTI technique would have
failed to detect the asteroid motion, and in many cases even very
bright asteroids would have been missed.
A few dense star-field regions were also processed by the
Spacewatch analysts using both the IMPACT and SALTAD software, although this was difficult, as archived Spacewatch imagery typically avoids low Galactic latitudes. In one analyzed
scan, the MF detector identified nine asteroids, whereas the MTI

technique located only six. In general, the results were that at

least 50% more asteroids were found in the denser star fields.
Limiting magnitude and performance characterization in available dense star field image sets are awaiting further analysis.
4.3. Usefulness in Recovery Operations
One particular observational procedure for which matched
filtering was recognized as being of significant relevance concerned the area of asteroid recovery and tracking. For NEA
search methodologies to be useful, one cannot only provide
detections of asteroids but must also be able to do high-accuracy
astrometry and collect multiple positional measurements over a
period of several days. This is required in order to refine the
orbital elements of an NEA detection to the point that it can be
reacquired during a future favorable observational epoch. Unfortunately, since many faint asteroids are detected at opposition
when their signal strength is highest, the days following the
discovery can see a fading of the intensity to an undetectable
level. Also, the earliest orbital elements from the discovery measurements are not well determined and can only be used in an
approximate way to localize the asteroid on the next days reacquisition imagery collection. In actual operations, operators
have the greatest difficulty in knowing the position in the field
that the asteroid will appear in the future. The direction and speed
of motion are usually better defined and can be used as a priori
information to severely narrow the number of motion hypotheses
that need to be performed with the MF. Thus, an entire field of
view can be scanned in a matter of seconds by searching over a
limited range of directions and apparent angular velocities for the
asteroid, undergoing a recovery type search. This eliminates any
run-time issues, and the processing can be run at the highest level
of detection performance.
As an example, the asteroid Apollo 1998 VD35 (one of 538 asteroids classified as potentially hazardous) is shown in Figure 12
not long after its discovery in 1998. During this time its position
was relatively uncertain despite its relatively bright magnitude.
A full SALTAD analysis of its uncertainty region took 2 minutes
and 31 s for all 2563 hypotheses (all possible directions and
speeds) on a 2.2 GHz Pentium IV. By using the known rate
(between 8.2 and 11.2 pixels of motion between each image) and
direction of motion (52 south of east on the sky with an error of
30 assumed), the processing time was cut to 3.7 s. The full usefulness of SALTAD will be realized in searching for much fainter
detections with positional uncertainty over a larger region of the
sky. Typically, experience has shown that SALTAD will find the
moving object if it is observable to the human eye in the image sequence. In addition, with a limited hypothesis set, the

Fig. 11.Examples of asteroid detections missed by the MTI technique (due to common star/galaxy exclusion regions) yet detected by the MF. Images are displayed
using a three-color multiframe display technique (i.e., frame 1 is red, frame 2 is green, and frame 3 is blue; thus, stationary objects appear gray).

Fig. 12.Example of an asteroid recovery reacquisition of Apollo 1998 VD35 (within the white box).

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false-alarm rates will be dramatically reduced along with runtime costs.

4.4. Conclusions
Application of matched filter processing has been shown to
improve detection rates in a given set of imagery by roughly
40%, with the greatest gains occurring for the fainter asteroids approaching the limiting magnitude of the imaging system.
For Spacewatch imagery, a doubling of the number of asteroids
found in a scene occurred between 21 and 22 mag, which will be
helpful in the search for NEAs smaller than 1 km or larger NEAs
farther away from opposition with the Sun. At issue is the increasing level of false alarms as the image-processing system
approaches the limiting magnitude of the data. Improved preprocessing and image cleanup of the data sets is recommended,
as well as further study toward forming more robust postprocessing automated screening prior to human verification.

Finally, the application of matched filtering to NEA recovery

and tracking operations is a very promising application of this
technology for the NEA community and can be fielded with
minimal processing capability due to the drastically reduced runtime requirements (very limited hypothesis set) in this mode of
operation.

The authors would like to acknowledge Steve Pravdo of the

NEAT program for his cooperation in providing further data sets
to help execute this program. Furthermore, the Spacewatch project team has also been instrumental in providing data and analysis support and in recognizing the future potential that advanced
image processing holds for this field. This work was sponsored
by NASAs Office of Space Science Applied Information Systems Research Program under contract NAS5-01121.

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