• Corpus ID: 253708397

Astrometric Calibration and Source Characterisation of the Latest Generation Neuromorphic Event-based Cameras for Space Imaging

@inproceedings{Ralph2022AstrometricCA,
  title={Astrometric Calibration and Source Characterisation of the Latest Generation Neuromorphic Event-based Cameras for Space Imaging},
  author={Nicholas O. Ralph and Alexandre Marcireau and Saeed Afshar and N. F. H. Tothill and Andr{\'e} van Schaik and Gregory Cohen},
  year={2022}
}

• N. Ralph, Alexandre Marcireau, +3 authors Gregory Cohen
• Published 17 November 2022
• Physics

—As an emerging approach to space situational aware- ness and space imaging, the practical use of an event-based camera in space imaging for precise source analysis is still in its infancy. The nature of event-based space imaging and data collection needs to be further explored to develop more effective event-based space image systems and advance the capabilities of event-based tracking systems with improved target measurement models. Moreover, for event measurements to be meaningful, a framework must be investigated for event-based camera calibra- tion to project events from pixel array coordinates in the image plane to coordinates in a target resident space object’s reference frame. In this paper, the traditional techniques of conventional astronomy are reconsidered to properly utilise the event-based camera for space imaging and space situational awareness. This paper presents the techniques and systems used for calibrating an event-based camera for reliable and accurate measurement acquisition. These techniques are vital in building event-based space imaging systems capable of real-world space situational awareness tasks. By calibrating sources detected using the event- based camera, the spatio-temporal characteristics of detected sources or ‘event sources’ can be related to the photometric characteristics of the underlying astrophysical objects. Finally, these characteristics are analysed to establish a foundation for principled processing and observing techniques which appropri-ately exploit the capabilities of the event-based camera.