Machine Learning-Based Identification of Contaminated Images in Light Curves Data Preprocessing

Abstract

Attitude is one of the crucial parameters for space objects and plays a vital role in collision prediction and debris removal. Analyzing light curves to determine attitude is the most commonly used method. In photometric observations, outliers may exist in the obtained light curves due to various reasons. Therefore, preprocessing is required to remove these outliers to obtain high quality light curves. Through statistical analysis, the reasons leading to outliers can be categorized into two main types: first, the brightness of the object significantly increases due to the passage of a star nearby, referred to as "stellar contamination," and second, the brightness markedly decreases due to cloudy cover, referred to as "cloudy contamination." Traditional approach of manually inspecting images for contamination is time-consuming and labor-intensive. However, We propose the utilization of machine learning methods as a substitute. Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Support Vector Machines (SVM) are employed to identify cases of stellar contamination and cloudy contamination, achieving F1 scores of 1.00 and 0.98 on test set, respectively. We also explored other machine learning methods such as Residual Network-18 (ResNet-18) and Light Gradient Boosting Machine (lightGBM), then conducted comparative analyses of the results.