Hyper-connected GAlaxy Merger Multiscale Analysis (Hyper-GAMMA)
This research project is a collaborative effort of the research group Intelligent Systems of the JBI and the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute. The research is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). The PhD student will be supervised by dr. Michael Wilkinson of the JBI, and prof. dr. Scott Trager of the Kapteyn Astronomical Institute.
In this project new image processing tools based on the notion of hyperconnectivity will be developed. Hyperconnectivity is an extension of the notion of connectivity. Connected filters are object-based filters, whereas other image filters are based on local structure. The main drawbacks of connected filters stem from their inability to deal with overlap. Hyperconnectivity addresses this, and recent extensions to the axiomatic framework of hyperconnectivity allow development of a wide range of object-based filters which can handle overlap. At the moment only a few such filters have been developed.
The aim of the project is to categorize different types of hyperconnectivity, to develop new image filters and multi-scale analysis tools. The key property of the new methods will be that they can deal with overlapping objects as distinct entities. Through multi-scale analysis, they will be able to measure degrees of overlap. These methods will be tested in the tasks of distinguishing merging and overlapping galaxies in large-scale astronomical surveys. Finally, we will develop efficient algorithms for these new filters, and provide these as a source code library and demonstration programs.
The full project proposal and project description can be found here. Information about the University of Groningen can be found at the website www.rug.nl. Detailed information about the research groups can be found at http://www.cs.rug.nl/is (Intelligent Systems), and http://www.rug.nl/sterrenkunde/ (Kapteyn Astronomical Institute).