Morphological Galaxies Classification According to Hubble-de Vaucouleurs Diagram Using CNNs

Pier Luigi Mazzeo, Antonio Rizzo, Cosimo Distante

Abstract: Galaxies morphology classification is a crucial task for studying their physical properties, formation and evolutionary histories. The large-scale surveys on universe has boosted the need to develop techniques for automated galaxies morphological classification. This paper proposes a system able to classify automatically galaxies according to the Hubble De Vaucouleurs diagram. We introduce a novel CNN architectures that for the first time was trained to automatically classify galaxies according to 26-classes Hubble-De Vaucouleurs scheme. We use Galaxy Zoo dataset, using the decision tree, to extract a labeled examples containing an even amount of images of each 26-classes. We also compared different CNN Backbones in order to assess obtained galaxies classification results. We obtain a balanced multi-class accuracy (BCA) of more than 80% in classifying all 26 Hubble-De Vaucouleurs galaxy categories.