用AI自动清除卫星轨迹,提升天文图像质量
STARLINC: Satellite Trail Artifact Removal using Inter-Frame Correlation

- 结合帧间差分与合成数据训练,无需逐像素标注
- 在真实数据上显著优于基线方法,提升图像可用性
- 适合处理海量天文影像,助力下一代巡天项目
低地球轨道卫星(如星链)的快速增长正日益污染天文观测数据。传统人工筛查已无法应对每晚生成的数TB数据,亟需可靠的自动化去除卫星轨迹的方法。现有通用线条检测方法因领域差异——天文图像多为灰度、星星稀疏且信噪比低——难以适用。此外,缺乏大规模标注数据使从零训练新模型不切实际。为此,我们提出STARLINC,首个无需像素级标注的基于机器学习的卫星轨迹去除框架。该方法融合合成轨迹生成、帧间差分图以突出瞬时轨迹,以及热力图提供像素级定位线索。在真实数据上的大量实验表明,其性能显著超越基线,成为下一代天文巡天的可扩展解决方案。代码开源:https://github.com/starioKim/STARLINC。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The rapid expansion of low Earth orbit satellites such as Starlink is increasingly contaminating astronomical surveys. In practice, contaminated images are often identified through inspection. However, modern surveys generate terabytes of data each night, making manual screening infeasible and necessitating reliable automated methods for satellite trail removal. Unfortunately, existing general-domain line detection methods fail to generalize to astronomical images due to domain mismatch, which are mostly grayscale with sparse bright stars and have a low signal-to-noise ratio. Moreover, training new models from scratch is impractical due to the lack of large-scale annotated astronomical datasets. To address these challenges, we introduce STARLINC, the first ML-based framework for satellite trail removal without requiring tedious pixel-level annotation of astronomical images. STARLINC combines synthetic satellite trail generation for training, inter-frame differential maps from temporally adjacent exposures to highlight transient trails, and heatmaps to provide additional localization cues for pixel-level segmentation. Extensive experiments on real-world data demonstrate substantial improvements over baselines, establishing STARLINC as a scalable solution for next-generation astronomical surveys. Code is available at https://github.com/starioKim/STARLINC.
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