Dongmei Cai

Peng Jia, Xuebo Wu, Zhengyang Li et al.

The point spread function (PSF) reflects states of a telescope and plays an important role in development of data processing methods, such as PSF based astrometry, photometry and image restoration. However, for wide field small aperture telescopes (WFSATs), estimating PSF in any position of the whole field of view is hard, because aberrations induced by the optical system are quite complex and the signal to noise ratio of star images is often too low for PSF estimation. In this paper, we further develop our deep neural network (DNN) based PSF modelling method and show its applications in PSF estimation. During the telescope alignment and testing stage, our method collects system calibration data through modification of optical elements within engineering tolerances (tilting and decentering). Then we use these data to train a DNN (Tel--Net). After training, the Tel--Net can estimate PSF in any field of view from several discretely sampled star images. We use both simulated and experimental data to test performance of our method. The results show that the Tel--Net can successfully reconstruct PSFs of WFSATs of any states and in any positions of the FoV. Its results are significantly more precise than results obtained by the compared classic method - Inverse Distance Weight (IDW) interpolation. Our method provides foundations for developing of deep neural network based data processing methods for WFSATs, which require strong prior information of PSFs.

Peng Jia, Mingyang Ma, Dongmei Cai et al.

The Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor is widely used to measure aberrations induced by atmospheric turbulence in adaptive optics systems. However if there exists strong atmospheric turbulence or the brightness of guide stars is low, the accuracy of wavefront measurements will be affected. In this paper, we propose a compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method. Instead of reconstructing wavefronts with slope measurements of all sub-apertures, our method reconstructs wavefronts with slope measurements of sub-apertures which have spot images with high signal to noise ratio. Besides, we further propose to use a deep neural network to accelerate wavefront reconstruction speed. During the training stage of the deep neural network, we propose to add a drop-out layer to simulate the compressive sensing process, which could increase development speed of our method. After training, the compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method can reconstruct wavefronts in high spatial resolution with slope measurements from only a small amount of sub-apertures. We integrate the straightforward compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method with image deconvolution algorithm to develop a high-order image restoration method. We use images restored by the high-order image restoration method to test the performance of our the compressive Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensing method. The results show that our method can improve the accuracy of wavefront measurements and is suitable for real-time applications.

Peng Jia, Ruiyu Ning, Ruiqi Sun et al.

Image restoration methods are commonly used to improve the quality of astronomical images. In recent years, developments of deep neural networks and increments of the number of astronomical images have evoked a lot of data--driven image restoration methods. However, most of these methods belong to supervised learning algorithms, which require paired images either from real observations or simulated data as training set. For some applications, it is hard to get enough paired images from real observations and simulated images are quite different from real observed ones. In this paper, we propose a new data--driven image restoration method based on generative adversarial networks with option--driven learning. Our method uses several high resolution images as references and applies different learning strategies when the number of reference images is different. For sky surveys with variable observation conditions, our method can obtain very stable image restoration results, regardless of the number of reference images.

Peng Jia, Xiyu Li, Zhengyang Li et al.

The point spread function reflects the state of an optical telescope and it is important for data post-processing methods design. For wide field small aperture telescopes, the point spread function is hard to model, because it is affected by many different effects and has strong temporal and spatial variations. In this paper, we propose to use the denoising autoencoder, a type of deep neural network, to model the point spread function of wide field small aperture telescopes. The denoising autoencoder is a pure data based point spread function modelling method, which uses calibration data from real observations or numerical simulated results as point spread function templates. According to real observation conditions, different levels of random noise or aberrations are added to point spread function templates, making them as realizations of the point spread function, i.e., simulated star images. Then we train the denoising autoencoder with realizations and templates of the point spread function. After training, the denoising autoencoder learns the manifold space of the point spread function and can map any star images obtained by wide field small aperture telescopes directly to its point spread function, which could be used to design data post-processing or optical system alignment methods.

Peng Jia, Yi Huang, Bojun Cai et al.

Texture is one of the most obvious characteristics in solar images and it is normally described by texture features. Because textures from solar images of the same wavelength are similar, we assume texture features of solar images are multi-fractals. Based on this assumption, we propose a pure data-based image restoration method: with several high resolution solar images as references, we use the Cycle-Consistent Adversarial Network to restore burred images of the same steady physical process, in the same wavelength obtained by the same telescope. We test our method with simulated and real observation data and find that our method can improve the spatial resolution of solar images, without loss of any frames. Because our method does not need paired training set or additional instruments, it can be used as a post-processing method for solar images obtained by either seeing limited telescopes or telescopes with ground layer adaptive optic system.

Yi Huang, Peng Jia, Dongmei Cai et al.

Next-generation ground-based solar observations require good image quality metrics for post-facto processing techniques. Based on the assumption that texture features in solar images are multi-fractal which can be extracted by a trained deep neural network as feature maps, a new reduced-reference objective image quality metric, the perception evaluation is proposed. The perception evaluation is defined as cosine distance of Gram matrix between feature maps extracted from high resolution reference image and that from blurred images. We evaluate performance of the perception evaluation with simulated and real observation images. The results show that with a high resolution image as reference, the perception evaluation can give robust estimate of image quality for solar images of different scenes.