autoscan

About
Author
Notes
GitHub
Training Data
Citing autoscan
License

To identify scientifically valuable transients or moving objects on the sky, astronomical imaging surveys have typically taken a manual approach, employing humans to vet candidate events extracted from difference images by eye. Usually, the vast majority of these are artifacts of processing or instrumentation, making the search process tedious, error-prone, time-consuming, and subjective.

Difference image objects scored from 0 (garbage) to 1 (real) by autoscan.

autoscan is a python package developed for the Dark Energy Survey Supernova Survey that uses the supervised machine learning technique known as Random Forest to quickly, accurately, automatically, and consistently identify difference image objects caused by genuine astrophysical variability, implementing the framework described in Goldstein et al. (2015).

Author

Notes

autoscan is provided on GitHub as a reference implementation only, with no guarantee of general usability. It was developed for use in the difference imaging pipeline for the Dark Energy Survey, and it assumes an Oracle database structure and input file structure that are specific to the survey.

Training Data

You can download the training data (features and postage stamps) for autoscan below. A description of the training data appears in section 3 of Goldstein et al. (2015). Note that many of the data files exceed 1GB in size. We recommend that you use a command line tool such as wget or curl to execute the downloads.

Features

The following download contains the class labels and values of the 38 features presented in Table 2 of Goldstein et al. (2015) computed over each of the 898,963 detections in the autoscan training data set. The structure of the table is described in the first few lines of the file.

Images

The following downloads contain the postage stamp images (search, template, and subtraction) for the training instances in fits and gif format.

Citing autoscan

If you make use of autoscan source code or training data in your work, please cite:

License

Copyright 2015 the author. All rights reserved.

autoscan is free software licensed under the GNU General Public License Version 3. See the file LICENSE for the full terms of this license.