Deblending and Classifying Astronomical Sources with Mask R-CNN Deep Learning

We apply a new deep learning technique to detect, classify, and deblend sources in multi-band astronomical images. We train and evaluate the performance of an artificial neural network built on the Mask R-CNN image processing framework, a general code for efficient object detection, classification, and instance segmentation. After evaluating the performance of our network against simulated ground truth images for star and galaxy classes, we find a precision of 92% at 80% recall for stars and a precision of 98% at 80% recall for galaxies in a typical field with $\sim30$ galaxies/arcmin$^2$. We investigate the deblending capability of our code, and find that clean deblends are handled robustly during object masking, even for significantly blended sources. This technique, or extensions using similar network architectures, may be applied to current and future deep imaging surveys such as LSST and WFIRST. Our code, Astro R-CNN, is publicly available at https://github.com/burke86/astro_rcnn.