Galaxies, Human Eyes, and Artificial Neural Networks
Abstract
The quantitative morphological classification of galaxies is important for understanding the origin of type frequency and correlations with environment. However, galaxy morphological classification is still mainly done visually by dedicated individuals, in the spirit of Hubble's original scheme and its modifications. The rapid increase in data on galaxy images at low and high redshift calls for a re-examination of the classification schemes and for automatic methods. Here are shown results from a systematic comparison of the dispersion among human experts classifying a uniformly selected sample of more than 800 digitized galaxy images. These galaxy images were then classified by six of the authors independently. The human classifications are compared with each other and with an automatic classification by an artificial neural network, which replicates the classification by a human expert to the same degree of agreement as that between two human experts.
Additional Information
© 1995 American Association for the Advancement of Science. Received 16 August 1994; accepted 1 December 1994. We thank the Schmidt Telescope unit of the Royal Observatory of Edinburgh for the plate material, the APM group at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Cambridge, for scanning support, M. Irwin and D. Lynden-Bell for helpful discussions. We are also grateful to the anonymous referee for helpful comments.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 52824
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- CaltechAUTHORS:20141215-142153377
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2014-12-15Created from EPrint's datestamp field
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2021-11-10Created from EPrint's last_modified field