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Hauptverfasser: Yan, Yibo, Liu, Chao, Li, Jiadong, Wang, Feng
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00473
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author Yan, Yibo
Liu, Chao
Li, Jiadong
Wang, Feng
author_facet Yan, Yibo
Liu, Chao
Li, Jiadong
Wang, Feng
contents Upcoming next-generation sky surveys will detect large number of faint objects with magnitudes larger than 25. When objects are crowded within a limited a field of view, blending becomes unavoidable. Blending leads to the omission of many sources during photometry in these fields, which cause an underestimates of tens of percent in crowded fields, and remains a major challenge for existing source-extraction techniques. Although artificial neural networks had shown promising results in the detection and classification in wide-field surveys, they often fail with severely blended stars. We developed a robust deep learning model, Astro-RetinaNet, based on the Retinanet algorithm to detect and classify blended sources in single-band astronomical images. After training and evaluating the performance of our network on simulated images, we find precision of 0.96, 0.89,0.70, 0.50,0.75 for single star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star and 5-or-more star blending cases, respectively, with star number density $\sim$22000 stars per $\rm arcmin^2$. We compare our method's detection capability and completeness both on CSST simulated NGC 2298 images and HST observed M31 images. In crowded and non-crowded stellar fields of simulated NGC 2298, our results show that the model can recover $82\%$ and $95\%$ sources respectively at magnitude ($i$ band) of 25, while for SExtractor and Photutils the completeness reduces to $20\%, 59\%$ and $60\%, 88\%$ respectively. In the M31 case, as faint as 27 magnitude ($F814W$) in a crowded field, Astro-RetinaNet detects 2,224 sources, significantly outperforming Photutils and SExtractor by factors of 3.4 and 7.1, respectively.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_00473
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Detection and classification of astronomical sources with Astro-RetinaNet in crowded stellar fields
Yan, Yibo
Liu, Chao
Li, Jiadong
Wang, Feng
Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
Upcoming next-generation sky surveys will detect large number of faint objects with magnitudes larger than 25. When objects are crowded within a limited a field of view, blending becomes unavoidable. Blending leads to the omission of many sources during photometry in these fields, which cause an underestimates of tens of percent in crowded fields, and remains a major challenge for existing source-extraction techniques. Although artificial neural networks had shown promising results in the detection and classification in wide-field surveys, they often fail with severely blended stars. We developed a robust deep learning model, Astro-RetinaNet, based on the Retinanet algorithm to detect and classify blended sources in single-band astronomical images. After training and evaluating the performance of our network on simulated images, we find precision of 0.96, 0.89,0.70, 0.50,0.75 for single star, 2-star, 3-star, 4-star and 5-or-more star blending cases, respectively, with star number density $\sim$22000 stars per $\rm arcmin^2$. We compare our method's detection capability and completeness both on CSST simulated NGC 2298 images and HST observed M31 images. In crowded and non-crowded stellar fields of simulated NGC 2298, our results show that the model can recover $82\%$ and $95\%$ sources respectively at magnitude ($i$ band) of 25, while for SExtractor and Photutils the completeness reduces to $20\%, 59\%$ and $60\%, 88\%$ respectively. In the M31 case, as faint as 27 magnitude ($F814W$) in a crowded field, Astro-RetinaNet detects 2,224 sources, significantly outperforming Photutils and SExtractor by factors of 3.4 and 7.1, respectively.
title Detection and classification of astronomical sources with Astro-RetinaNet in crowded stellar fields
topic Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.00473