Fast meteor tracking in noisy video sequences

Abstract

Meteor recording, detection, and analysis is one of the traditional topics of astronomy. This paper deals with fast-tracking of faint meteors and meteor showers in video sequences with high frame rates. Since meteors are fast optical events, the utilization of cameras with high frame rates and short exposure times is the standard technique of meteor tracks capture. Low efficiency of such camera systems is typically compensated with image intensifiers, mostly based on the microchannel plate (MCP). In this work, we use image data captured with the meteor automatic imager and analyzer, double-station system dedicated for observing faint meteor showers.The system works with minimal human interaction, and it is necessary to automatically process (i.e., identify all meteor candidates) all captured data as fast as possible.Results show possible speed-up of the image processing method when fluctuations of MCP are reduced.