Papers › Deep Learning Segmentation of Spiral Arms and Bars

Deep Learning Segmentation of Spiral Arms and Bars

5 Dec 2023arXiv:2312.02908archive 2025-07-28

Mike Walmsley, Ashley Spindler

We present the first deep learning model for segmenting galactic spiral arms and bars. In a blinded assessment by expert astronomers, our predicted spiral arm masks are preferred over both current automated methods (99% of evaluations) and our original volunteer labels (79% of evaluations). Experts rated our spiral arm masks as `mostly good' to `perfect' in 89% of evaluations. Bar lengths trivially derived from our predicted bar masks are in excellent agreement with a dedicated crowdsourcing project. The pixelwise precision of our masks, previously impossible at scale, will underpin new research into how spiral arms and bars evolve.

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