Improved detection of faint extended astronomical objects through statistical attribute filtering

Abstract

In astronomy, images are produced by sky surveys containing a large number of objects. SExtractor is a widely used program for automated source extraction and cataloguing but struggles with faint extended sources. Using SExtractor as a reference, the paper describes an improvement of a previous method proposed by the authors. It is a Max-Treebased method for extraction of faint extended sources without stronger image smoothing. Node filtering depends on the noise distribution of a statistic calculated from attributes. Run times are in the same order.