Machine learning-based analysis has become essential to efficiently handle the increasing massive data from modern astronomical instruments in recent years. Churchwell et al. (2006, 2007) identified infrared ring structures, which are believed to relate to the formation of massive stars, with the human eye. Recently, Ueda et al. (2020) showed that Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) can detect objects with indistinct boundaries such as infrared rings with comparable accuracy as the human eye. However, such a classification-based object detector requires a long processing time, making it impractical to apply to existing all-sky 12 μm and 22 μm data captured by WISE. We introduced the Single Shot MultiBox Detector (SSD, Liu W. et al. 2016), which directly outputs the locations and confidences of targets, to significantly reduce the time for identification. We applied an SSD model to the rings toward the 6 deg2 region in the Galactic plane which is the same region used in Ueda et al. (2020), and confirmed that the time for identification was reduced by about 1/80 with maintaining almost the same accuracy. Since detecting small rings is still difficult by even this model, an input image should be cropped
into small images, which increases the number of applications of the model. There is still room for reducing the
processing time. In the future, we will try to solve this problem and detect the rings faster.
Recently, the amount of data obtained from astronomical instruments has been increasing explosively, and data science methods such as Machine Learning/Deep Learning gain attention on the back of the growth in demand for automatic analysis. Using these methods, the number of applications to the target sources that have clear boundaries with the background i.e., stars, planets, and galaxies is increasing year by year. However, there are a few studies which applied the data science methods to the interstellar medium (ISM) distributed in the Galactic plane, which have complicated and ambiguous silhouettes. We aim to develop classifiers to automatically extract various structures of the ISM by Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) that is strong in image recognition even in deep learning. In this study, we focus on the infra-red (IR) ring structures distributed in the Galactic plane. Based on the catalog of Churchwell et al. (2006, 2007), we created a “Ring” dataset from the Spitzer/GLIMPSE 8 μm and Spitzer/MIPSGAL 24 μm data and optimized the parameters of the CNN model. We applied the developed model to a range of 16.5° ≤ l ≤ 19.5°, |b| ≤ 1° . As a result, 234 “Ring” candidates are detected. The “Ring” candidates were matched with 75% Milky Way Project (MWP, Simpson et al. 2012) “Ring” and 65% WISE Hii region catalog (Anderson et al. 2014). In addition, new“Ring”and Hii region candidate objects were also found. For these results, we conclude that the CNN model may have a recognition accuracy equal to or better than that of human eyes.
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