The Umbrella software suite for automated asteroid detection

TL;DR

The paper introduces Umbrella, an open-source software suite for automated asteroid detection, validation, and reporting, featuring a novel faint trail detection algorithm and accessible through desktop and web interfaces for real-time survey data processing.

Contribution

It presents Umbrella2, a modular library with innovative algorithms, and demonstrates its effectiveness in real-time asteroid survey data reduction.

Findings

Successful real-time asteroid detection in survey data

Effective faint trail detection algorithm

Benchmark results on EURONEAR fields

Abstract

We present the Umbrella software suite for asteroid detection, validation, identification and reporting. The current core of Umbrella is an open-source modular library, called Umbrella2, that includes algorithms and interfaces for all steps of the processing pipeline, including a novel detection algorithm for faint trails. Building on the library, we have also implemented a detection pipeline accessible both as a desktop program (ViaNearby) and via a web server (Webrella), which we have successfully used in near real-time data reduction of a few asteroid surveys on the Wide Field Camera of the Isaac Newton Telescope. In this paper we describe the library, focusing on the interfaces and algorithms available, and we present the results obtained with the desktop version on a set of well-curated fields used by the EURONEAR project as an asteroid detection benchmark.