Identification and Localization of Cometary Activity in Solar System Objects with Machine Learning

This involves taking multiple images to detect an object more than once within a short enough time for the detections to be linked. The actual linkage of detection can include decision trees or the connection of several detections together within similar co-moving velocities (Kubica et al., 2005; Masci et al., 2019). Multiple detection linking algorithms can link the detections of both point-source, asteroidal detections and those that are extended, as for comets. Even for comets, whose detections have a large, extended appearance, multiple detections can be linked as for point sources if the measurement of the comet's position relative to the moving frame of the object is consistent from detection to detection (Denneau et al., 2013). However, in some survey imaging pipelines, extended objects, defined as having a width more expansive than the measured width for known point sources, can be flagged as potential outliers and removed from further processing (Duev et al., 2019).