Papers › Deep Transfer Learning for Blended Source Identification in Galaxy Survey Data

Deep Transfer Learning for Blended Source Identification in Galaxy Survey Data

15 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.08180links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

S. Farrens, A. Lacan, A. Guinot, A. Z. Vitorelli

The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.

We present BlendHunter, a proof-of-concept for a deep transfer learning based approach for the automated and robust identification of blended sources in galaxy survey data. We take the VGG-16 network with pre-trained convolutional layers and train the fully connected layers on parametric models of COSMOS images. We test the efficacy of the transfer learning by taking the weights learned on the parametric models and using them to identify blends in more realistic CFIS-like images. We compare the performance of this method to SEP (a Python implementation of SExtractor) as function of noise level and the separation between sources. We find that BlendHunter outperforms SEP by ∼15% in terms of classification accuracy for close blends (<10 pixel separation between sources) regardless of the noise level used for training. Additionally, the method provides consistent results to SEP for distant blends (≥10 pixel separation between sources) provided the network is trained on data with a relatively close noise standard deviation to the target images. The code and data have been made publicly available to ensure the reproducibility of the results.

PaperPDFCode

Code

cosmostat/blendhunter officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections