A Visual Solution in Asteroids Detection

Asteroid discovery is not an activity restricted to the notable surveying efforts that have their private staff, equipment and detection programs, but it is also popular among amateurs and various mini-surveys. In light of this situation, new Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) are found out every day. Most of the amateurs and mini-surveys discoveries are obtained by means of manual methods, based on the human eye examination of celestial image data. Naturally, these methods are limited by the size and complexity of the input data. To address the issues linked to such dimensional data, we developed under the NEARBY project an automated pipeline prototype for asteroid detection. This solution comes in the form of a modular system, allowing us to explore different detection techniques. Throughout this paper a visual technique, based on image processing will be presented as a possible future replacement for the current technique used now in NEARBY pipeline, the astronomical solution based on computation in the celestial reference system.