No Arabic abstract
As we enter the era of large-scale imaging surveys with the up-coming telescopes such as LSST and SKA, it is envisaged that the number of known strong gravitational lensing systems will increase dramatically. However, these events are still very rare and require the efficient processing of millions of images. In order to tackle this image processing problem, we present Machine Learning techniques and apply them to the Gravitational Lens Finding Challenge. The Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) presented have been re-implemented within a new modular, and extendable framework, LEXACTUM. We report an Area Under the Curve (AUC) of 0.9343 and 0.9870, and an execution time of 0.0061s and 0.0594s per image, for the Space and Ground datasets respectively, showing that the results obtained by CNNs are very competitive with conventional methods (such as visual inspection and arc finders) for detecting gravitational lenses.
Future large-scale surveys with high resolution imaging will provide us with a few $10^5$ new strong galaxy-scale lenses. These strong lensing systems however will be contained in large data amounts which are beyond the capacity of human experts to visually classify in a unbiased way. We present a new strong gravitational lens finder based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs). The method was applied to the Strong Lensing challenge organised by the Bologna Lens Factory. It achieved first and third place respectively on the space-based data-set and the ground-based data-set. The goal was to find a fully automated lens finder for ground-based and space-based surveys which minimizes human inspect. We compare the results of our CNN architecture and three new variations (invariant views and residual) on the simulated data of the challenge. Each method has been trained separately 5 times on 17 000 simulated images, cross-validated using 3 000 images and then applied to a 100 000 image test set. We used two different metrics for evaluation, the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) score and the recall with no false positive ($mathrm{Recall}_{mathrm{0FP}}$). For ground based data our best method achieved an AUC score of $0.977$ and a $mathrm{Recall}_{mathrm{0FP}}$ of $0.50$. For space-based data our best method achieved an AUC score of $0.940$ and a $mathrm{Recall}_{mathrm{0FP}}$ of $0.32$. On space-based data adding dihedral invariance to the CNN architecture diminished the overall score but achieved a higher no contamination recall. We found that using committees of 5 CNNs produce the best recall at zero contamination and consistenly score better AUC than a single CNN. We found that for every variation of our CNN lensfinder, we achieve AUC scores close to $1$ within $6%$.
We use convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and recurrent neural networks (RNNs) to estimate the parameters of strong gravitational lenses from interferometric observations. We explore multiple strategies and find that the best results are obtained when the effects of the dirty beam are first removed from the images with a deconvolution performed with an RNN-based structure before estimating the parameters. For this purpose, we use the recurrent inference machine (RIM) introduced in Putzky & Welling (2017). This provides a fast and automated alternative to the traditional CLEAN algorithm. We obtain the uncertainties of the estimated parameters using variational inference with Bernoulli distributions. We test the performance of the networks with a simulated test dataset as well as with five ALMA observations of strong lenses. For the observed ALMA data we compare our estimates with values obtained from a maximum-likelihood lens modeling method which operates in the visibility space and find consistent results. We show that we can estimate the lensing parameters with high accuracy using a combination of an RNN structure performing image deconvolution and a CNN performing lensing analysis, with uncertainties less than a factor of two higher than those achieved with maximum-likelihood methods. Including the deconvolution procedure performed by RIM, a single evaluation can be done in about a second on a single GPU, providing a more than six orders of magnitude increase in analysis speed while using about eight orders of magnitude less computational resources compared to maximum-likelihood lens modeling in the uv-plane. We conclude that this is a promising method for the analysis of mm and cm interferometric data from current facilities (e.g., ALMA, JVLA) and future large interferometric observatories (e.g., SKA), where an analysis in the uv-plane could be difficult or unfeasible.
Prostate cancer is one of the most common forms of cancer and the third leading cause of cancer death in North America. As an integrated part of computer-aided detection (CAD) tools, diffusion-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (DWI) has been intensively studied for accurate detection of prostate cancer. With deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) significant success in computer vision tasks such as object detection and segmentation, different CNNs architectures are increasingly investigated in medical imaging research community as promising solutions for designing more accurate CAD tools for cancer detection. In this work, we developed and implemented an automated CNNs-based pipeline for detection of clinically significant prostate cancer (PCa) for a given axial DWI image and for each patient. DWI images of 427 patients were used as the dataset, which contained 175 patients with PCa and 252 healthy patients. To measure the performance of the proposed pipeline, a test set of 108 (out of 427) patients were set aside and not used in the training phase. The proposed pipeline achieved area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.87 (95% Confidence Interval (CI): 0.84-0.90) and 0.84 (95% CI: 0.76-0.91) at slice level and patient level, respectively.
Convolutional Neural Networks (ConvNets) are one of the most promising methods for identifying strong gravitational lens candidates in survey data. We present two ConvNet lens-finders which we have trained with a dataset composed of real galaxies from the Kilo Degree Survey (KiDS) and simulated lensed sources. One ConvNet is trained with single textit{r}-band galaxy images, hence basing the classification mostly on the morphology. While the other ConvNet is trained on textit{g-r-i} composite images, relying mostly on colours and morphology. We have tested the ConvNet lens-finders on a sample of 21789 Luminous Red Galaxies (LRGs) selected from KiDS and we have analyzed and compared the results with our previous ConvNet lens-finder on the same sample. The new lens-finders achieve a higher accuracy and completeness in identifying gravitational lens candidates, especially the single-band ConvNet. Our analysis indicates that this is mainly due to improved simulations of the lensed sources. In particular, the single-band ConvNet can select a sample of lens candidates with $sim40%$ purity, retrieving 3 out of 4 of the confirmed gravitational lenses in the LRG sample. With this particular setup and limited human intervention, it will be possible to retrieve, in future surveys such as Euclid, a sample of lenses exceeding in size the total number of currently known gravitational lenses.
Image retargeting is the task of making images capable of being displayed on screens with different sizes. This work should be done so that high-level visual information and low-level features such as texture remain as intact as possible to the human visual system, while the output image may have different dimensions. Thus, simple methods such as scaling and cropping are not adequate for this purpose. In recent years, researchers have tried to improve the existing retargeting methods and introduce new ones. However, a specific method cannot be utilized to retarget all types of images. In other words, different images require different retargeting methods. Image retargeting has a close relationship to image saliency detection, which is relatively a new image processing task. Earlier saliency detection methods were based on local and global but low-level image information. These methods are called bottom-up methods. On the other hand, newer approaches are top-down and mixed methods that consider the high level and semantic information of the image too. In this paper, we introduce the proposed methods in both saliency detection and retargeting. For the saliency detection, the use of image context and semantic segmentation are examined, and a novel mixed bottom-up, and top-down saliency detection method is introduced. After saliency detection, a modified version of an existing retargeting method is utilized for retargeting the images. The results suggest that the proposed image retargeting pipeline has excellent performance compared to other tested methods. Also, the subjective evaluations on the Pascal dataset can be used as a retargeting quality assessment dataset for further research.