An Approach to Detect Cavities in X-Ray Astronomical Images Using Granular Convolutional Neural Networks

Abstract

Detection of cavities in X-ray astronomical images has become a field of interest, since the flourishing studies on black holes and the Active Galactic Nuclei (AGN). In this paper, an approach is proposed to detect cavities in X-ray astronomical images using our newly designed Granular Convolutional Neural Network (GCNN) based classifiers. The raw data are firstly preprocessed to obtain images of the observed objects, i.e., galaxies or galaxy clusters. In each image, pixels are classified into three categories, (1) the faint backgrounds (BKG), (2) the cavity regions (CAV), and (3) the bright central gas regions (CNT). And the sample sets are then generated by dividing large images into subimages with a window size according to the cavities' scale. Since the number of BKG samples are far more than the other types, to achieve balanced training sets, samples from the major class are split into subsets, i.e., granule. Then a group of three-convolutional-layer granular CNN networks without subsampling layers are designed as the classifiers, and trained with the labeled granular sample sets. Finally, the trained GCNN classifiers are applied to new observations, so as to estimate the cavity regions with a voting strategy and locate them with elliptical profiles on the raw observation images. Experiments and applications of our approach are demonstrated on 40 X-ray astronomical observations retrieved from chandra Data Archive (CDA). Comparisons among our approach, the β-model fitting and the Unsharp Masking (UM) methods were also performed, which prove our approach was more accurate and robust.