Value Sliced and Derivative Images for Source Mask in JWST MIRI Photometry

One of many ways for the James-Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to capture astronomical signals is the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) Imaging mode. To make this data ready for analysis, the JWST standard reduction pipeline has three stages and many mandatory and optional steps to produce analysis-ready data. At the end of stage 3, there is a resampled 2-dimensional image for each band/wavelength, an estimated source catalog, and a source mask (segmentation image) locating these sources. This study focuses on enhancing this source mask part so that it can detect more point sources, previously cataloged after older missions, without spuriously "detecting" false positives. Combined use of the fraction of a resampled image and a derivative image seemed to improve the capability to detect unWISE catalog-located sources better than original segmentation images in 7 different real cases with the MIRI F770W filter. A few approaches are recommended to make better use of these value-sliced and derivative images.