Galaxy morphology classification with deep convolutional neural networks

Abstract

We propose a variant of residual networks (ResNets) for galaxy morphology classification. The variant, together with other popular convolutional neural networks (CNNs), are applied to a sample of 28790 galaxy images from Galaxy Zoo 2 dataset, to classify galaxies into five classes, i.e. completely round smooth, in-between smooth (between completely round and cigar-shaped), cigar-shaped smooth, edge-on and spiral. A variety of metrics, such as accuracy, precision, recall, F1 value and AUC, show that the proposed network achieves the state-of-the-art classification performance among the networks, namely, Dieleman, AlexNet, VGG, Inception and ResNets. The overall classification accuracy of our network on the testing set is 95.2083% and the accuracy of each type is given as: completely round, 96.6785%; in-between, 94.4238%; cigar-shaped, 58.6207%; edge-on, 94.3590% and spiral, 97.6953% respectively. Our model algorithm can be applied to large-scale galaxy classification in forthcoming surveys such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST).