Machine Learning-based Identification of Contaminated Images in Light Curve Data Preprocessing

• Published in: Research in astronomy and astrophysics 2024-04, Vol.24 (4), p.45025
• Main Authors: Li, Hui, Li, Rong-Wang, Shu, Peng, Li, Yu-Qiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Artificial neural networks; Attitudes; Brightness; Comparative analysis; Contamination; Data analysis; Light; Light curve; light pollution; Machine learning; methods: data analysis; Neural networks; Outliers (statistics); Photometric observations; Preprocessing; Statistical analysis; Statistical methods; techniques: image processing
• ISSN: 1674-4527; 2397-6209
• DOI: 10.1088/1674-4527/ad339e

Attitude is one of the crucial parameters for space objects and plays a vital role in collision prediction and debris removal. Analyzing light curves to determine attitude is the most commonly used method. In photometric observations, outliers may exist in the obtained light curves due to various reasons. Therefore, preprocessing is required to remove these outliers to obtain high quality light curves. Through statistical analysis, the reasons leading to outliers can be categorized into two main types: first, the brightness of the object significantly increases due to the passage of a star nearby, referred to as “stellar contamination,” and second, the brightness markedly decreases due to cloudy cover, referred to as “cloudy contamination.” The traditional approach of manually inspecting images for contamination is time-consuming and labor-intensive. However, we propose the utilization of machine learning methods as a substitute. Convolutional Neural Networks and SVMs are employed to identify cases of stellar contamination and cloudy contamination, achieving F1 scores of 1.00 and 0.98 on a test set, respectively. We also explore other machine learning methods such as ResNet-18 and Light Gradient Boosting Machine, then conduct comparative analyses of the results.