Paper detail

Carving out the low surface brightness universe with NoiseChisel

NoiseChisel is a program to detect very low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) features with minimal assumptions on their morphology. It was introduced in 2015 and released within a collection of data analysis programs and libraries known as GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro). The 10th stable version of Gnuastro was released in August 2019 and NoiseChisel has significantly improved: detecting even fainter signal, enabling better user control over its inner workings, and many bug fixes. The most important change until version 0.10 is that NoiseChisel's segmentation features have been moved into a new program called Segment. Another major change is the final growth strategy of its true detections, for example NoiseChisel is able to detect the outer wings of M51 down to S/N of 0.25, or 25.97 mag/arcsec2 on a single-exposure SDSS image (r-band). Segment is also able to detect the localized HII regions as "clumps" much more successfully. For a detailed list of improvements after version 0.10, see the most recent manual. Finally, to orchestrate a controlled analysis, the concept of reproducibility is discussed: this paper itself is exactly reproducible (commit 751467d).