Detection of asteroid trails in Hubble Space Telescope images using Deep Learning

We present an application of Deep Learning for the image recognition of asteroid trails in single-exposure photos taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. Using algorithms based on multi-layered deep Convolutional Neural Networks, we report accuracies of above 80% on the validation set. Our project was motivated by the Hubble Asteroid Hunter project on Zooniverse, which focused on identifying these objects in order to localize and better characterize them. We aim to demonstrate that Machine Learning techniques can be very useful in trying to solve problems that are closely related to Astronomy and Astrophysics, but that they are still not developed enough for very specific tasks.