Improving Faint Object Detection for Space Situational Awareness with Variational Autoencoders

The paper introduces a deep‑learning pipeline that improves detection of faint moving objects in optical space situational awareness imagery. It combines a Tiny‑U‑Net segmentation network to mask stars with a partial‑convolution variational autoencoder (astro‑VAE) that learns background statistics and performs context‑aware inpainting. The reconstructed, star‑free backgrounds are used as a preprocessing step before detection, and when integrated with a shift‑and‑stack scheme, the method shows high‑fidelity background reconstruction and significant enhancement of moving‑target detectability in real ground‑based telescope data.

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• computer-vision