2,107 research outputs found
Some Good Reasons to Use Matched Filters for the Detection of Point Sources in CMB Maps
In this draft we comment on the results concerning the performances of
matched filters, scale adaptive filters and Mexican hat wavelet that recently
appeared in literature in the context of point source detection in Cosmic
Microwave Background maps. In particular, we show that, contrary to what has
been claimed, the use of the matched filters still appear to be the most
reliable and efficient method to disantangle point sources from the
backgrounds, even when using detection criterion that, differently from the
classic thresholding rule, takes into account not only the height of
the peaks in the signal corresponding to the candidate sources but also their
curvature.Comment: Replacement after submission to A&A and referee's comments. Astronomy
and Astrophysics, in press, JNL/2003/473
Detection of new point-sources in WMAP Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) maps at high Galactic latitude. A new technique to extract point sources from CMB maps
In experimental microwave maps, point-sources can strongly affect the
estimation of the power-spectrum and/or the test of Gaussianity of the Cosmic
Microwave Background (CMB) component. As a consequence, their removal from the
sky maps represents a critical step in the analysis of the CMB data. Before
removing a source, however, it is necessary to detect it and source extraction
consists of a delicate preliminary operation. In the literature, various
techniques have been presented to detect point-sources in the sky maps. The
most sophisticated ones exploit the multi-frequency nature of the observations
that is typical of the CMB experiments. These techniques have "optimal"
theoretical properties and, at least in principle, are capable of remarkable
performances. Actually, they are rather difficult to use and this deteriorates
the quality of the obtainable results. In this paper, we present a new
technique, the "weighted matched filter" (WMF), that is quite simple to use and
hence more robust in practical applications. Such technique shows particular
efficiency in the detection of sources whose spectra have a slope different
from zero. We apply this method to three Southern Hemisphere sky regions - each
with an area of 400 square degrees - of the seven years Wilkinson Microwave
Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) maps and compare the resulting sources with those of
the two seven-year WMAP point-sources catalogues. In these selected regions we
find seven additional sources not previously listed in WMAP catalogues and
discuss their most likely identification and spectral properties.Comment: Astronomy and Astrophysics, 2011, in pres
Statistical properties of dust far-infrared emission
The description of the statistical properties of dust emission gives
important constraints on the physics of the interstellar medium but it is also
a useful way to estimate the contamination of diffuse interstellar emission in
the cases where it is considered a nuisance. The main goals of this analysis of
the power spectrum and non-Gaussian properties of 100 micron dust emission are
1) to estimate the power spectrum of interstellar matter density in three
dimensions, 2) to review and extend previous estimates of the cirrus noise due
to dust emission and 3) to produce simulated dust emission maps that reproduce
the observed statistical properties. The main results are the following. 1) The
cirrus noise level as a function of brightness has been previously
overestimated. It is found to be proportional to instead of ^1.5, where
is the local average brightness at 100 micron. This scaling is in
accordance with the fact that the brightness fluctuation level observed at a
given angular scale on the sky is the sum of fluctuations of increasing
amplitude with distance on the line of sight. 2) The spectral index of dust
emission at scales between 5 arcmin and 12.5 degrees is =-2.9 on average
but shows significant variations over the sky. Bright regions have
systematically steeper power spectra than diffuse regions. 3) The skewness and
kurtosis of brightness fluctuations is high, indicative of strong
non-Gaussianity. 4) Based on our characterization of the 100 micron power
spectrum we provide a prescription of the cirrus confusion noise as a function
of wavelength and scale. 5) Finally we present a method based on a modification
of Gaussian random fields to produce simulations of dust maps which reproduce
the power spectrum and non-Gaussian properties of interstellar dust emission.Comment: 13 pages, 13 figures. Accepted for publication in A&
Unevenly-sampled signals: a general formalism of the Lomb-Scargle periodogram
The periodogram is a popular tool that tests whether a signal consists only
of noise or if it also includes other components. The main issue of this method
is to define a critical detection threshold that allows identification of a
component other than noise, when a peak in the periodogram exceeds it. In the
case of signals sampled on a regular time grid, determination of such a
threshold is relatively simple. When the sampling is uneven, however, things
are more complicated. The most popular solution in this case is to use the
"Lomb-Scargle" periodogram, but this method can be used only when the noise is
the realization of a zero-mean, white (i.e. flat-spectrum) random process. In
this paper, we present a general formalism based on matrix algebra, which
permits analysis of the statistical properties of a periodogram independently
of the characteristics of noise (e.g. colored and/or non-stationary), as well
as the characteristics of sampling.Comment: 10 pages, 11 figures, Astronomy and Astrophysics, in pres
The correct estimate of the probability of false detection of the matched filter in the detection of weak signals. II. (Further results with application to a set of ALMA and ATCA data)
The matched filter (MF) is one of the most popular and reliable techniques to
the detect signals of known structure and amplitude smaller than the level of
the contaminating noise. Under the assumption of stationary Gaussian noise, MF
maximizes the probability of detection subject to a constant probability of
false detection or false alarm (PFA). This property relies upon a priori
knowledge of the position of the searched signals, which is usually not
available. Recently, it has been shown that when applied in its standard form,
MF may severely underestimate the PFA. As a consequence the statistical
significance of features that belong to noise is overestimated and the
resulting detections are actually spurious. For this reason, an alternative
method of computing the PFA has been proposed that is based on the probability
density function (PDF) of the peaks of an isotropic Gaussian random field. In
this paper we further develop this method. In particular, we discuss the
statistical meaning of the PFA and show that, although useful as a preliminary
step in a detection procedure, it is not able to quantify the actual
reliability of a specific detection. For this reason, a new quantity is
introduced called the specific probability of false alarm (SPFA), which is able
to carry out this computation. We show how this method works in targeted
simulations and apply it to a few interferometric maps taken with the Atacama
Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Australia Telescope Compact
Array (ATCA). We select a few potential new point sources and assign an
accurate detection reliability to these sources.Comment: 28 pages, 20 figures, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Minor changes and
some typos correcte
On Optimal Detection of Point Sources in CMB Maps
Point-source contamination in high-precision Cosmic Microwave Background
(CMB) maps severely affects the precision of cosmological parameter estimates.
Among the methods that have been proposed for source detection, wavelet
techniques based on ``optimal'' filters have been proposed.In this paper we
show that these filters are in fact only restrictive cases of a more general
class of matched filters that optimize signal-to-noise ratio and that have, in
general, better source detection capabilities, especially for lower amplitude
sources. These conclusions are confirmed by some numerical experiments.
\keywords{Methods: data analysis -- Methods: statisticalComment: 6 pages, 3 figure
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