This article is about finding all the pixels which belong to a star – also known as star clustering. A short C++ implementation based on CImg is shown below. In Part 2 of my “Night sky image processing” Series I was writing about thresholding. The result of the thresholding is a binary image. In this context it means the “1” pixels belong to stars, the “0” pixels belong to the background. I used Otsu’s method to calculate an according threshold value.

Introduction to star clustering

The binary image is now further examined in a process called clustering. In simple words the pixels which belong together (i.e. the neighbours) are grouped together. The result of this clustering process is a list of pixel groups which belong together – i.e. a list of stars and the pixels belonging to each star.

The implemented algorithm is based on the paper “Improving night sky star image processing algorithm for star sensors“ from Mohammad Vali Arbabmir et. al. However, in detail it is slightly different. My implementation assumes that the supplied image cannot be modified during the process. Hence I am using a set to put all white pixels into. To me this is a good compromise between memory consumption, performance and simplicity. However, the implementation can be further improved with respect to runtime performance when one would used a 2D array for the white pixels instead of a set.

The algorithm

The clustering algorithm is relatively straight forward:

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