No Arabic abstract
Large astronomical databases obtained from sky surveys such as the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey (SSS) invariably suffer from spurious records coming from artefactual effects of the telescope, satellites and junk objects in orbit around earth and physical defects on the photographic plate or CCD. Though relatively small in number these spurious records present a significant problem in many situations where they can become a large proportion of the records potentially of interest to a given astronomer. Accurate and robust techniques are needed for locating and flagging such spurious objects, and we are undertaking a programme investigating the use of machine learning techniques in this context. In this paper we focus on the four most common causes of unwanted records in the SSS: satellite or aeroplane tracks, scratches, fibres and other linear phenomena introduced to the plate, circular halos around bright stars due to internal reflections within the telescope and diffraction spikes near to bright stars. Appropriate techniques are developed for the detection of each of these. The methods are applied to the SSS data to develop a dataset of spurious object detections, along with confidence measures, which can allow these unwanted data to be removed from consideration. These methods are general and can be adapted to other astronomical survey data.
Large astronomical databases obtained from sky surveys such as the SuperCOSMOS Sky Surveys (SSS) invariably suffer from a small number of spurious records coming from artefactual effects of the telescope, satellites and junk objects in orbit around earth and physical defects on the photographic plate or CCD. Though relatively small in number these spurious records present a significant problem in many situations where they can become a large proportion of the records potentially of interest to a given astronomer. In this paper we focus on the four most common causes of unwanted records in the SSS: satellite or aeroplane tracks, scratches fibres and other linear phenomena introduced to the plate, circular halos around bright stars due to internal reflections within the telescope and diffraction spikes near to bright stars. Accurate and robust techniques are needed for locating and flagging such spurious objects. We have developed renewal strings, a probabilistic technique combining the Hough transform, renewal processes and hidden Markov models which have proven highly effective in this context. The methods are applied to the SSS data to develop a dataset of spurious object detections, along with confidence measures, which can allow this unwanted data to be removed from consideration. These methods are general and can be adapted to any future astronomical survey data.
Current work on lane detection relies on large manually annotated datasets. We reduce the dependency on annotations by leveraging massive cheaply available unlabelled data. We propose a novel loss function exploiting geometric knowledge of lanes in Hough space, where a lane can be identified as a local maximum. By splitting lanes into separate channels, we can localize each lane via simple global max-pooling. The location of the maximum encodes the layout of a lane, while the intensity indicates the the probability of a lane being present. Maximizing the log-probability of the maximal bins helps neural networks find lanes without labels. On the CULane and TuSimple datasets, we show that the proposed Hough Transform loss improves performance significantly by learning from large amounts of unlabelled images.
In order to extract cosmological information from observations of the millimeter and submillimeter sky, foreground components must first be removed to produce an estimate of the cosmic microwave background (CMB). We developed a machine-learning approach for doing so for full-sky temperature maps of the millimeter and submillimeter sky. We constructed a Bayesian spherical convolutional neural network architecture to produce a model that captures both spectral and morphological aspects of the foregrounds. Additionally, the model outputs a per-pixel error estimate that incorporates both statistical and model uncertainties. The model was then trained using simulations that incorporated knowledge of these foreground components that was available at the time of the launch of the Planck satellite. On simulated maps, the CMB is recovered with a mean absolute difference of $<4mu$K over the full sky after masking map pixels with a predicted standard error of $>50mu$K; the angular power spectrum is also accurately recovered. Once validated with the simulations, this model was applied to Planck temperature observations from its 70GHz through 857GHz channels to produce a foreground-cleaned CMB map at a Healpix map resolution of NSIDE=512. Furthermore, we demonstrate the utility of the technique for evaluating how well different simulations match observations, particularly in regard to the modeling of thermal dust.
In a recent paper, M. Lifshits and E. Setterqvist introduced the taut string of a Brownian motion $w$, defined as the function of minimal quadratic energy on $[0,T]$ staying in a tube of fixed width $h>0$ around $w$. The authors showed a Law of Large Number (L.L.N.) for the quadratic energy spent by the string for a large time $T$. In this note, we exhibit a natural renewal structure for the Brownian taut string, which is directly related to the time decomposition of the Brownian motion in terms of its $h$-extrema (as first introduced by Neveu and Pitman). Using this renewal structure, we derive an expression for the constant in the L.L.N. given by M. Lifshits and E. Setterqvist. In addition, we provide a Central Limit Theorem (C.L.T.) for the fluctuations of the energy spent by the Brownian taut string.
Spicules are intermittently rising above the surface of the Sun eruptions; EUV jets are now also reported in immediately above layers. The variation of spicule orientation with respect to the solar latitude, presumably reflecting the confinement and the focusing of ejecta by the surrounding global coronal magnetic field, is an important parameter to understand their dynamical properties. A wealth of high resolution images of limb spicules are made available in H CaII emission from the SOT Hinode mission. Furthermore, the Hough transform is applied to the resulting images for making a statistical analysis of spicule orientations in different regions around the solar limb, from the pole to the equator. Spicules are visible in a radial direction in the polar regions with a tilt angle (less than 200). The tilt angle is even reduced to 10 degrees inside the coronal hole with open magnetic field lines and at the lower latitude the tilt angle reaches values in excess of 50 degree.