155,335 research outputs found
Sparse component separation for accurate CMB map estimation
The Cosmological Microwave Background (CMB) is of premier importance for the
cosmologists to study the birth of our universe. Unfortunately, most CMB
experiments such as COBE, WMAP or Planck do not provide a direct measure of the
cosmological signal; CMB is mixed up with galactic foregrounds and point
sources. For the sake of scientific exploitation, measuring the CMB requires
extracting several different astrophysical components (CMB, Sunyaev-Zel'dovich
clusters, galactic dust) form multi-wavelength observations. Mathematically
speaking, the problem of disentangling the CMB map from the galactic
foregrounds amounts to a component or source separation problem. In the field
of CMB studies, a very large range of source separation methods have been
applied which all differ from each other in the way they model the data and the
criteria they rely on to separate components. Two main difficulties are i) the
instrument's beam varies across frequencies and ii) the emission laws of most
astrophysical components vary across pixels. This paper aims at introducing a
very accurate modeling of CMB data, based on sparsity, accounting for beams
variability across frequencies as well as spatial variations of the components'
spectral characteristics. Based on this new sparse modeling of the data, a
sparsity-based component separation method coined Local-Generalized
Morphological Component Analysis (L-GMCA) is described. Extensive numerical
experiments have been carried out with simulated Planck data. These experiments
show the high efficiency of the proposed component separation methods to
estimate a clean CMB map with a very low foreground contamination, which makes
L-GMCA of prime interest for CMB studies.Comment: submitted to A&
Means of confusion: how pixel noise affects shear estimates for weak gravitational lensing
Weak-lensing shear estimates show a troublesome dependence on the apparent
brightness of the galaxies used to measure the ellipticity: In several studies,
the amplitude of the inferred shear falls sharply with decreasing source
significance. This dependence limits the overall ability of upcoming large
weak-lensing surveys to constrain cosmological parameters.
We seek to provide a concise overview of the impact of pixel noise on
weak-lensing measurements, covering the entire path from noisy images to shear
estimates. We show that there are at least three distinct layers, where pixel
noise not only obscures but biases the outcome of the measurements: 1) the
propagation of pixel noise to the non-linear observable ellipticity; 2) the
response of the shape-measurement methods to limited amount of information
extractable from noisy images; and 3) the reaction of shear estimation
statistics to the presence of noise and outliers in the measured ellipticities.
We identify and discuss several fundamental problems and show that each of
them is able to introduce biases in the range of a few tenths to a few percent
for galaxies with typical significance levels. Furthermore, all of these biases
do not only depend on the brightness of galaxies but also on their ellipticity,
with more elliptical galaxies often being harder to measure correctly. We also
discuss existing possibilities to mitigate and novel ideas to avoid the biases
induced by pixel noise. We present a new shear estimator that shows a more
robust performance for noisy ellipticity samples. Finally, we release the
open-source python code to predict and efficiently sample from the noisy
ellipticity distribution and the shear estimators used in this work at
https://github.com/pmelchior/epsnoiseComment: integrated the origin of the moment correlation (thanks to Alan
Heavens). source code at https://github.com/pmelchior/epsnois
FASTLens (FAst STatistics for weak Lensing) : Fast method for Weak Lensing Statistics and map making
With increasingly large data sets, weak lensing measurements are able to
measure cosmological parameters with ever greater precision. However this
increased accuracy also places greater demands on the statistical tools used to
extract the available information. To date, the majority of lensing analyses
use the two point-statistics of the cosmic shear field. These can either be
studied directly using the two-point correlation function, or in Fourier space,
using the power spectrum. But analyzing weak lensing data inevitably involves
the masking out of regions or example to remove bright stars from the field.
Masking out the stars is common practice but the gaps in the data need proper
handling. In this paper, we show how an inpainting technique allows us to
properly fill in these gaps with only operations, leading to a new
image from which we can compute straight forwardly and with a very good
accuracy both the pow er spectrum and the bispectrum. We propose then a new
method to compute the bispectrum with a polar FFT algorithm, which has the main
advantage of avoiding any interpolation in the Fourier domain. Finally we
propose a new method for dark matter mass map reconstruction from shear
observations which integrates this new inpainting concept. A range of examples
based on 3D N-body simulations illustrates the results.Comment: Final version accepted by MNRAS. The FASTLens software is available
from the following link : http://irfu.cea.fr/Ast/fastlens.software.ph
Distributed video coding for wireless video sensor networks: a review of the state-of-the-art architectures
Distributed video coding (DVC) is a relatively new video coding architecture originated from two fundamental theorems namely, Slepian–Wolf and Wyner–Ziv. Recent research developments have made DVC attractive for applications in the emerging domain of wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs). This paper reviews the state-of-the-art DVC architectures with a focus on understanding their opportunities and gaps in addressing the operational requirements and application needs of WVSNs
Nonlocal Myriad Filters for Cauchy Noise Removal
The contribution of this paper is two-fold. First, we introduce a generalized
myriad filter, which is a method to compute the joint maximum likelihood
estimator of the location and the scale parameter of the Cauchy distribution.
Estimating only the location parameter is known as myriad filter. We propose an
efficient algorithm to compute the generalized myriad filter and prove its
convergence. Special cases of this algorithm result in the classical myriad
filtering, respective an algorithm for estimating only the scale parameter.
Based on an asymptotic analysis, we develop a second, even faster generalized
myriad filtering technique.
Second, we use our new approaches within a nonlocal, fully unsupervised
method to denoise images corrupted by Cauchy noise. Special attention is paid
to the determination of similar patches in noisy images. Numerical examples
demonstrate the excellent performance of our algorithms which have moreover the
advantage to be robust with respect to the parameter choice
Locally adaptive image denoising by a statistical multiresolution criterion
We demonstrate how one can choose the smoothing parameter in image denoising
by a statistical multiresolution criterion, both globally and locally. Using
inhomogeneous diffusion and total variation regularization as examples for
localized regularization schemes, we present an efficient method for locally
adaptive image denoising. As expected, the smoothing parameter serves as an
edge detector in this framework. Numerical examples illustrate the usefulness
of our approach. We also present an application in confocal microscopy
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