Knowledge-Based Morphological Classification of Galaxies from Vision Features

Devendra Singh Dhami, David Leake, Sriraam Natarajan

Abstract: This paper presents a knowledge-based approach to the task of learning and identifying galaxies from their images. To this effect, we propose a crowd-sourced pipeline approach that employs two systems - case based and rule based systems. First, the approach extracts morphological features i.e. features describing the structure of the galaxy such as its shape, central characteristics e.g., has a bar or bulge at its center)etc., using computer vision techniques. Then it employs a case based reasoning system and a rule based system to perform the classification task. Our initial results show that this pipeline is effective in learning reasonably accurate models on this complex task.