Abstract:When optical telescope is used for monitoring synchronous orbit targets, gazing targets and gazing stars are two kinds of general working mode. And due to the different speed of stars and targets relative to the Earth, they images on the CCD will be different as round shaped small targets and dashes. For their differences in image, a method is proposed to distinguish targets and stars by using target geometric shape, in which, firstly morphological filter is used to make image pre-processing to improve signal noise ratio of targets without disturbing the shape features of targets. Then the compactness of targets is calculated by binary segmentation and the feature marks, and the external ellipse’s major and minor axis is calculated based on origin moment. Finally, the compactness of targets and the minor to major axial ratio of the external ellipse are feature fused, and the suitable threshold is chosen from fusion results to distinguish between targets and stars. The results show that the proposed method based on feature fusion is an effective single-frame target detection method.