Deep learning for studies of galaxy morphology

D Tuccillo (1, 2) , Marc Huertas-Company (2) , Etienne Decencière (1) , Santiago Velasco-Forero (1)

1 CMM - Centre de Morphologie Mathématique
2 Observatoire de Paris

Establishing accurate morphological measurements of galaxies in a reasonable amount of time for future big-data surveys such as EUCLID, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope or the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope is a challenge. Because of its high level of abstraction with little human intervention, deep learning appears to be a promising approach. Deep learning is a rapidly growing discipline that models high-level patterns in data as complex multilayered networks. In this work we test the ability of deep convolutional networks to provide paramet-ric properties of Hubble Space Telescope like galaxies (half-light radii, Sérsic indices, total flux etc..). We simulate a set of galaxies including point spread function and realistic noise from the CANDELS survey and try to recover the main galaxy parameters using deep-learning. We compare the results with the ones obtained with the commonly used profile fitting based software GALFIT. This way showing that with our method we obtain results at least equally good as the ones obtained with GALFIT but, once trained, with a factor 5 hundred time faster.

Mots clés: Galaxy; Surveys; Deep learning; Convolutional neural networks

Domaines: Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Astrophysique galactique [astro-ph.GA]

D Tuccillo, Marc Huertas-Company, Etienne Decencière, Santiago Velasco-Forero. Deep learning for studies of galaxy morphology. IAU Symposium 325 on Astroinformatics, Oct 2016, Sorrente, Italy. pp.191 - 196, ⟨10.1017/S1743921317000552⟩. ⟨hal-01535506⟩