2019/07/31 by Maxime Paillassa, E. Bertin, Emmanuel Bertin +2 · 30 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #Algorithm #Artificial intelligence #Astrophysics and Cosmic Phenomena #CCD and CMOS Imaging Sensors #Classifier (UML) #Computer science #Computer vision #Convolutional neural network #Gamma-ray bursts and supernovae #Multispectral image #Pattern recognition (psychology) #Pixel #Residual #Segmentation #astro-ph.IM
paper · pdf · doi:10.1051/0004-6361/201936345
published in Astronomy and Astrophysics 634, A48 (EDP Sciences) · 25 pages, 14 figures, accepted in A&A journal, https://github.com/mpaillassa/MaxiMask
openalex publication_date 2019/12/17 · arxiv created 2020/02/11 · arxiv updated 2020/02/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
In this work, we propose two convolutional neural network classifiers for detecting contaminants in astronomical images. Once trained, our classifiers are able to identify various contaminants, such as cosmic rays, hot and bad pixels, persistence effects, satellite or plane trails, residual fringe patterns, nebulous features, saturated pixels, diffraction spikes, and tracking errors in images. They encompass a broad range of ambient conditions, such as seeing, image sampling, detector type, optics, and stellar density. The first classifier, M AXI M ASK , performs semantic segmentation and generates bad pixel maps for each contaminant, based on the probability that each pixel belongs to a given contaminant class. The second classifier, M AXI T RACK , classifies entire images and mosaics, by computing the probability for the focal plane to be affected by tracking errors. We gathered training and testing data from real data originating from various modern charged-coupled devices and near-infrared cameras, that are augmented with image simulations. We quantified the performance of both classifiers and show that M AXI M ASK achieves state-of-the-art performance for the identification of cosmic ray hits. Thanks to a built-in Bayesian update mechanism, both classifiers can be tuned to meet specific science goals in various observational contexts.