Space Debris Tracking with the Poisson Labeled Multi-Bernoulli Filter

Abstract

This paper presents a Bayesian filter based solution to the Space Object (SO) tracking problem using simulated optical telescopic observations. The presented solution utilizes the Probabilistic Admissible Region (PAR) approach, which is an orbital admissible region that adheres to the assumption of independence between newborn targets and surviving SOs. These SOs obey physical energy constraints in terms of orbital semi-major axis length and eccentricity within a range of orbits of interest. In this article, Low Earth Orbit (LEO) SOs are considered. The solution also adopts the Partially Uniform Birth (PUB) intensity, which generates uniformly distributed births in the sensor field of view. The measurement update then generates a particle SO distribution. In this work, a Poisson Labeled Multi-Bernoulli (PLMB) multi-target tracking filter is proposed, using the PUB intensity model for the multi-target birth density, and a PAR for the spatial density to determine the initial orbits of SOs. Experiments are demonstrated using simulated SO trajectories created from real Two-Line Element data, with simulated measurements from twelve telescopes located in observatories, which form part of the Falcon telescope network. Optimal Sub-Pattern Assignment (OSPA) and CLEAR MOT metrics demonstrate encouraging multi-SO tracking results even under very low numbers of observations per SO pass.