Noise estimation and probability of detection in non-resolved images: Application to space object observation

Charged Couple Device (CCD) technology is widely used in various scientific measurement contexts. CCD equipped cameras have revolutionized astronomy and space-related optical telescope measurements in recent years. They are also used in electroscopic measurements, e.g., in fields such as geology, biology, and medicine. The signal-to-noise ratio and the probability of detection are crucial to design experiments observation setups properly and to employ further mathematical methods for data exploitation such as, e.g. multi-target tracking methods. Previous attempts to correctly characterize the signal-to-noise ratio for star observations are revisited in this work and adapted for the application of near-Earth object observations and high precision measurements, leading to a modified CCD equation. Our formulation proposes a novel distribution of the signal noise that accurately accounts for the truncation noise and the presence of ambiguous pixels. These improvements are employed to derive the probability of detection and the SNR with significant improvements compared to existing formulations when ambiguous pixels are present. (C) 2019 COSPAR. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.