Recently, astronomy has witnessed great advancements in detectors and telescopes. Imaging data collected by these instruments are organized into very large datasets that form data-oriented astronomy. The imaging data contain many radio galaxies (RGs) that are interesting to astronomers. However, considering that the scale of astronomical databases in the information age is extremely large, a manual search of these galaxies is impractical given the need for manual labor. Therefore, the ability to detect specific types of galaxies largely depends on computer algorithms. Applying machine learning algorithms on large astronomical data sets can more effectively detect galaxies using photometric images. Astronomers are motivated to develop tools that can automatically analyze massive imaging data, including developing an automatic morphological detection of specified radio sources. Galaxy Zoo projects have generated great interest in visually classifying galaxy samples using CNNs. Banfield studied radio morphologies and host galaxies derived from visual inspection in the Radio Galaxy Zoo project. However, there are relatively more studies on galaxy classification, while there are fewer studies on galaxy detection. We develop a galaxy detection model, which realizes the location and classification of Fanaroff–Riley class I (FR I) and Fanaroff–Riley class II (FR II) galaxies. The field of target detection has also developed rapidly since the convolutional neural network was proposed. You Only Look Once: Unified, Real-Time Object Detection (YOLO) is a neural-network-based target detection model proposed by Redmon et al. We made several improvements to the detection effect of dense galaxies based on the original YOLOv5, mainly including the following. (1) We use Varifocal loss, whose function is to weigh positive and negative samples asymmetrically and highlight the main sample of positive samples in the training phase. (2) Our neural network model adds an attention mechanism for the convolution kernel so that the feature extraction network can adjust the size of the receptive field dynamically in deep convolutional neural networks. In this way, our model has good adaptability and effect for identifying galaxies of different sizes on the picture. (3) We use empirical practices suitable for small target detection, such as image segmentation and reducing the stride of the convolutional layers. Apart from the three major contributions and novel points of the model, the thesis also included different data sources, i.e., radio images and optical images, aiming at better classification performance and more accurate positioning. We used optical image data from SDSS, radio image data from FIRST, and label data from FR Is and FR IIs catalogs to create a data set of FR Is and FR IIs. Subsequently, we used the data set to train our improved YOLOv5 model and finally realize the automatic classification and detection of FR Is and FR IIs. Experimental results prove that our improved method achieves better performance. mAP@0.5 of our model reaches 82.3%, and the location (Ra and Dec) of the galaxies can be identified more accurately. Our model has great astronomical significance. For example, it can help astronomers find FR I and FR II galaxies to build a larger-scale galaxy catalog. Our detection method can also be extended to other types of RGs. Thus, astronomers can locate the specific type of galaxies in a considerably shorter time and with minimum human intervention, or it can be combined with other observation data (spectrum and redshift) to explore other properties of the galaxies.
Read full abstract
Nov 8, 2023
Danyi Huang + 11
Open Access
