Detection, Instance Segmentation, and Classification for Astronomical Surveys with Deep Learning (DeepDISC): Detectron2 Implementation and Demonstration with Hyper Suprime-Cam Data

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the use of advanced deep learning models, especially transformers, for simultaneous detection, deblending, and classification of astronomical sources in large survey images, achieving high accuracy and robustness.

Contribution

It introduces a deep learning framework using Detectron2 for astronomical image analysis, showing transformers outperform CNNs in detection, deblending, and classification tasks.

Findings

Transformers outperform CNNs in detection and deblending accuracy.

High classification accuracy for galaxies with near 100% completeness and purity.

Robustness of transformers across different contrast scalings.

Abstract

The next generation of wide-field deep astronomical surveys will deliver unprecedented amounts of images through the 2020s and beyond. As both the sensitivity and depth of observations increase, more blended sources will be detected. This reality can lead to measurement biases that contaminate key astronomical inferences. We implement new deep learning models available through Facebook AI Research's Detectron2 repository to perform the simultaneous tasks of object identification, deblending, and classification on large multi-band coadds from the Hyper Suprime-Cam (HSC). We use existing detection/deblending codes and classification methods to train a suite of deep neural networks, including state-of-the-art transformers. Once trained, we find that transformers outperform traditional convolutional neural networks and are more robust to different contrast scalings. Transformers are able to detect and deblend objects closely matching the ground truth, achieving a median bounding box Intersection over Union of 0.99. Using high quality class labels from the Hubble Space Telescope, we find that the best-performing networks can classify galaxies with near 100% completeness and purity across the whole test sample and classify stars above 60% completeness and 80% purity out to HSC i-band magnitudes of 25 mag. This framework can be extended to other upcoming deep surveys such as the Legacy Survey of Space and Time and those with the Roman Space Telescope to enable fast source detection and measurement. Our code, DeepDISC is publicly available at https://github.com/grantmerz/deepdisc.