# Towards Asteroid Detection in Microlensing Surveys with Deep Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.02239 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02239/

## Key facts

- Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 17 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 17 of 17)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Very Deep Convolutional Networks for Large-Scale Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.1556/) (2014)
- [Densely Connected Convolutional Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.06993/) (2016)
- [Rethinking the Inception Architecture for Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.00567/) (2015)
- [You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.02640/) (2015)
- [Auto-Encoding Variational Bayes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1312.6114/) (2013)
- [YOLOv3: An Incremental Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02767/) (2018)
- [CBAM: Convolutional Block Attention Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06521/) (2018)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [YOLO9000: Better, Faster, Stronger](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.08242/) (2016)
- [EfficientDet: Scalable and Efficient Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.09070/) (2019)
- [Path Aggregation Network for Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01534/) (2018)
- [Spatial Pyramid Pooling in Deep Convolutional Networks for Visual Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.4729/) (2014)
- [CSPNet: A New Backbone that can Enhance Learning Capability of CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.11929/) (2019)
- [Enhancing Geometric Factors in Model Learning and Inference for Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.03572/) (2020)
- [Tails: Chasing Comets with the Zwicky Transient Facility and Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.13352/) (2021)
- [A Two-Stage Deep Learning Detection Classifier for the ATLAS Asteroid Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08912/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Detecting Moving Objects With Machine Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.06148/) (2024)
- [A multi-model approach using XAI and anomaly detection to predict asteroid hazards](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15901/) (2025)
- [Adaptive Detection of Fast Moving Celestial Objects Using a Mixture of Experts and Physical-Inspired Neural Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.07777/) (2025)
- [Trajectory-Agnostic Asteroid Detection in TESS with Deep Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12391/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Asteroids are an indelible part of most astronomical surveys though only a few surveys are dedicated to their detection. Over the years, high cadence microlensing surveys have amassed several terabytes of data while scanning primarily the Galactic Bulge and Magellanic Clouds for microlensing events and thus provide a treasure trove of opportunities for scientific data mining. In particular, numerous asteroids have been observed by visual inspection of selected images. This paper presents novel deep learning-based solutions for the recovery and discovery of asteroids in the microlensing data gathered by the MOA project. Asteroid tracklets can be clearly seen by combining all the observations on a given night and these tracklets inform the structure of the dataset. Known asteroids were identified within these composite images and used for creating the labelled datasets required for supervised learning. Several custom CNN models were developed to identify images with asteroid tracklets. Model ensembling was then employed to reduce the variance in the predictions as well as to improve the generalisation error, achieving a recall of 97.67%. Furthermore, the YOLOv4 object detector was trained to localize asteroid tracklets, achieving a mean Average Precision (mAP) of 90.97%. These trained networks will be applied to 16 years of MOA archival data to find both known and unknown asteroids that have been observed by the survey over the years. The methodologies developed can be adapted for use by other surveys for asteroid recovery and discovery.