Denoise of Astronomical Images with Deep Learning

Removing noise which occurs inevitably when taking image data has been a big concern. There is a way to raise signal-to-noise ratio and it is regarded as the only way, image stacking. Image stacking is averaging or just adding all pixel values of multiple pictures taken of a specific area. Its performance and reliability are unquestioned, but its weaknesses are also evident. Object with fast proper motion can be vanished, and most of all, it takes too long time. So if we can handle single shot image well and achieve similar performance, we can overcome those weaknesses. Recent developments in deep learning have enabled things that were not possible with former algorithm-based programming. One of the things is generating data with more information from data with less information. As a part of that, we reproduced stacked image from single shot image using a kind of deep learning, conditional generative adversarial network (cGAN). r-band camcol2 south data were used from SDSS Stripe 82 data. From all fields, image data which is stacked with only 22 individual images and, as a pair of stacked image, single pass data which were included in all stacked image were used. All used fields are cut in $128{\times}128$ pixel size, so total number of image is 17930. 14234 pairs of all images were used for training cGAN and 3696 pairs were used for verify the result. As a result, RMS error of pixel values between generated data from the best condition and target data were $7.67{\times}10^{-4}$ compared to original input data, $1.24{\times}10^{-3}$. We also applied to a few test galaxy images and generated images were similar to stacked images qualitatively compared to other de-noising methods. In addition, with photometry, The number count of stacked-cGAN matched sources is larger than that of single pass-stacked one, especially for fainter objects. Also, magnitude completeness became better in fainter objects. With this work, it is possible to observe reliably 1 magnitude fainter object.