2009/01/14 by I. M. Stewart · 9 citations
Engineering · Medicine · Physics and Astronomy · #Advanced X-ray and CT Imaging #Energy (signal processing) #Flux (metallurgy) #Maximum likelihood #Medical Imaging Techniques and Applications #Monte Carlo method #Noise (video) #Radiation Detection and Scintillator Technologies #Sensitivity (control systems) #Sky #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361:200811311
published in Astronomy and Astrophysics 495(3), 989-1003 (EDP Sciences) · 17 pages, 10 figures. Accepted by Astronomy & Astrophysics
openalex publication_date 2009/01/14 · arxiv created 2009/01/21 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2016/06/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
A maximum likelihood (ML) technique for detecting compact sources in images of the X-ray sky is examined. Such images, in the relatively low exposure regime accessible to present X-ray observatories, exhibit Poissonian noise at background flux levels. A variety of source detection methods are compared via Monte Carlo, and the ML detection method is shown to compare favourably with the optimized-linear-filter (OLF) method when applied to a single image. Where detection proceeds in parallel on several images made in different energy bands, the ML method is shown to have some practical advantages which make it superior to the OLF method. Some criticisms of ML are discussed. Finally, a practical method of estimating the sensitivity of ML detection is presented, and is shown to be also applicable to sliding-box source detection.