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Astronomical Image Coaddition with Bundle-Adjusting Radiance Fields
Harlan Hutton · Harshitha Palegar · Shirley Ho · Miles Cranmer · Peter Melchior · Jenna Eubank

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in Machine Learning and the Physical Sciences »

Image coaddition is of critical importance to observational astronomy. This family of methods consisting of several processing steps such as image registration, resampling, deconvolution, and artifact removal is used to combine images into a single higher-quality image. An alternative to these methods that are built upon vectorized operations is the representation of an image function as a neural network, which has had considerable success in machine learning image processing applications. We propose a deep learning method employing gradient-based planar alignment with Bundle-Adjusting Radiance Fields (BARF) to combine, de-noise, and remove obstructions from observations of cosmological objects at different resolutions, seeing, and noise levels -- tasks not currently possible within a single process in astronomy. We test our algorithm on artificial images of star clusters, demonstrating powerful artifact removal and de-noising.

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Author Information

Harlan Hutton (Flatiron Institute Center for Computational Astrophysics)
Harshitha Palegar (Flatiron Institute CCA)
Shirley Ho (Flatiron Institute)

Shirley Ho is a group leader and acting director at Flatiron Institute at Simons foundation, a research professor of physics and an affiliated faculty at Center for Data Science at NYU. Ho also holds associate (adjunct) professorship at Carnegie Mellon University and visiting appointment at Princeton University. She was a senior scientist at Berkeley National Lab from 2016-2018 and a Cooper-Siegel Development chair professor at Carnegie Mellon University before that. Ho was a Seaborg and Chamberlain Fellow from 2008-2011 at Berkeley Lab, after receiving her PhD in Astrophysics from Princeton University in 2008 under supervision of David Spergel. Ho graduated summa cum laude with a B.A. in Physics and a B.A. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley. A cited expert in cosmology, machine learning applications in astrophysics and data science,her interests are using deep learning accelerated simulations to understand the Universe, and other astrophysical phenomena. She tries her best to balance her love for the Universe, the machine and life especially during these crazy times.

Miles Cranmer (Princeton University)

Miles Cranmer is an Astro PhD candidate trying to accelerate astrophysics with AI. Miles is from Canada and did his undergraduate in Physics at McGill. He is deeply interested in the automation of science, particularly aspects that are not yet tractable with existing machine learning, such as experiment planning, simulation, and theory. He works on symbolic regression, graph neural networks, normalizing flows, and learned simulation. He is hugely interested in symbolic ML, since, as he argues, symbolic models seem to be a surprisingly efficient basis for describing our universe.

Peter Melchior (Princeton University)
Jenna Eubank (Flatiron Institute)

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