Image-based multi-target tracking for asteroid and debris after a kinetic impact

The destruction of asteroids by means of kinetic impacts can effectively eliminate the impact threat to the Earth. To assess the impact effect, identification and tracking of asteroids and their residual debris after an impact is required. The identification and tracking of debris face the problem of large number and occlusion. In this paper, an image-based multi-target tracking method for asteroid and debris after a kinetic impact is proposed to handle the problem of accessing the disposal results of near-Earth asteroids, A mask is designed to segment the image into backgrounds, and the preliminary recognition results of residual debris are obtained by Hough transform. In addition, the debris occlusion problem is solved by the transform detection mechanism of the target contour architecture. Simulation results show that the proposed method can improve the accuracy of target number recognition and reduce the position tracking error of asteroid and residual debris.