Wide Field Imaging. I. Applications of Neural Networks to object detection and star/galaxy classification

[Abriged] Astronomical Wide Field Imaging performed with new large format CCD detectors poses data reduction problems of unprecedented scale which are difficult to deal with traditional interactive tools. We present here NExt (Neural Extractor): a new Neural Network (NN) based package capable to detect objects and to perform both deblending and star/galaxy classification in an automatic way. Traditionally, in astronomical images, objects are first discriminated from the noisy background by searching for sets of connected pixels having brightnesses above a given threshold and then they are classified as stars or as galaxies through diagnostic diagrams having variables choosen accordingly to the astronomer's taste and experience. In the extraction step, assuming that images are well sampled, NExt requires only the simplest a priori definition of "what an object is" (id est, it keeps all structures composed by more than one pixels) and performs the detection via an unsupervised NN approaching detection as a clustering problem which has been thoroughly studied in the artificial intelligence literature. In order to obtain an objective and reliable classification, instead of using an arbitrarily defined set of features, we use a NN to select the most significant features among the large number of measured ones, and then we use their selected features to perform the classification task. In order to optimise the performances of the system we implemented and tested several different models of NN. The comparison of the NExt performances with those of the best detection and classification package known to the authors (SExtractor) shows that NExt is at least as effective as the best traditional packages.Comment: MNRAS, in press. Paper with higher resolution images is available at http://www.na.astro.it/~andreon/listapub.htm

Increasing the Accuracy of Detection and Recognition in Visual Surveillance

Visual surveillance has two major steps of detecting and recognizing moving objects. In the detection stage, moving objects must be detected as quickly and accurately as possible and the influence of environmental light changes and waving trees should be reduced. In this research a block-based method is introduced in HSV color space in the detection stage. This method did not scan all the pixels of the frame and acted well in situations like sudden light changes. A powerful pattern recognition system should have powerful feature extraction and classification. Note that, feature extraction in gray level or RGB color space has problems such as environmental light changes, adding noise or changes in contrast and sharpness of images, which lead to weak classification. So the HSV color space was used. Here, Block-based Improved Center Symmetric Local Binary Pattern is introduced for feature extraction. In each component of the HSV color space, information of highlight areas in the image such as edge, shape and some texture was extracted. The histogram was calculated in two-level blocks and Support Vector Machine was used for classifying into vehicles, motorcycles and pedestrians. The obtained results in increasing the detection accuracy and decreasing the spent time were satisfactory.DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.11591/ijece.v2i3.33