Devising an edge effect compensation procedure to eliminate structural distortions during frequency filtering

Abstract

The object of this study is the process of filtering astronomical frames that contain images of potential objects in the Solar System. To recognize the image of each such object in contrast with the background of the frame, it is necessary to carry out frequency filtering of the image. Any frequency filtering using various image filters is aimed at reducing the dynamic range of the background substrate. Also, frequency filtering leads to an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio of the entire image or its fragments, depending on the configuration. However, the identified problem area of each image during frequency filtering is the distortion of the structure of its edges. Therefore, to solve this problem, an edge effect compensation procedure has been proposed to eliminate structural distortions during frequency filtering. Complementing the image with borders on all sides and the augmented extended image made it possible to introduce a formal connection between the pixel values of the extended image fragment and the pixel values of the extended original image. Testing was carried out using a high-pass Gaussian filter. The use of the devised edge effect compensation procedure made it possible to remove distortion of the structure of the image edges. The devised edge effect compensation procedure was tested in practice within the CoLiTec project. It was implemented during the in-frame processing stage of the Lemur software. The study showed that the use of the devised edge effect compensation procedure makes it possible to remove image artifacts compared to conventional filtering without taking into account the edge effect. Also, owing to edge effect compensation, structural image distortions were eliminated, and the signal-to-noise ratio was increased by 7–10 times