Joint estimation of telescope drift and space object tracking

With the proliferation of low-cost CCD-based sensors used on telescopes by amateur astronomers, there is potential to exploit these within an infrastructure for space surveillance. Observations may be corrupted by an undesirable drift of the telescope due to mount jittering and uncompensated diurnal motion of stars. This work presents an approach for drift compensation based on a joint estimation of the sensor drift and the states of the objects and stars observed by the telescope. It exploits a recent development in multi-object estimation, known as the single-cluster Probability Hypothesis Density filter, that was designed for group tracking. The sensor drift is obtained by estimating the collective motion of the stars, which is in turn used to correct the estimation of moving objects. The proposed method is illustrated on simulated and real data.