Object classification on video data of meteors and meteor-like phenomena: algorithm and data

• Published in: Monthly notices of the Royal Astronomical Society Vol. 516; no. 1; pp. 811 - 823
• Main Authors: Sennlaub, Rabea, Hofmann, Martin, Hankey, Mike, Ennes, Mario, Müller, Thomas, Kroll, Peter, Mäder, Patrick
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 31.08.2022
• Subjects: methods: data analysis; techniques: image processing; meteors; astronomical data bases: miscellaneous
• ISSN: 0035-8711; 1365-8711; 1365-2966; 1365-2966
• DOI: 10.1093/mnras/stac1948

ABSTRACT Every moment, countless meteoroids enter our atmosphere unseen. The detection and measurement of meteors offer the unique opportunity to gain insights into the composition of our solar systems’ celestial bodies. Researchers therefore carry out a wide-area-sky-monitoring to secure 360-degree video material, saving every single entry of a meteor. Existing machine intelligence cannot accurately recognize events of meteors intersecting the earth’s atmosphere due to a lack of high-quality training data publicly available. This work presents four reusable open source solutions for researchers trained on data we collected due to the lack of available labelled high-quality training data. We refer to the proposed data set as the NightSkyUCP data set, consisting of a balanced set of 10 000 meteor- and 10 000 non-meteor-events. Our solutions apply various machine-learning techniques, namely classification, feature learning, anomaly detection, and extrapolation. For the classification task, a mean accuracy of 99.1 per cent is achieved. The code and data are made public at figshare with DOI 10.6084/m9.figshare.16451625.