Space object characterization with infrared signature from a space-based platform

Abstract

In this paper, the problem of estimating the motion and shape parameters from the infrared signature of precession object is addressed. To limit the scope of this work, only objects with shape of flat-plane, cone, cylinder, cone-cylinder combination are considered. Different from the current research, the parameter estimating is based on signal modeling. First, a signal model is proposed to approximate the infrared signature based on the analysis of its generating process. Second, a two-step schematic is proposed to estimate the parameters based on the signal model. In the first step, the precession frequency is estimated with autocorrelation. In the next step, the particular error function is proposed and the momentum gradient algorithm is used to estimate other parameters. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm is capable of estimating shape and motion parameters with sufficient precision in most cases. This research shows the potential of using model based technology to extract information from the infrared signature of space target.