Publications

The plate processing pipeline produces a variety of image features for each object, thirty of which are used by the classification task. Five oblique decision trees vote to produce a classification of star, nonstar, or defect. Before the catalog is exported, multiple observations of each object are combined to produce a final classification of star or nonstar.

As one would expect, the performance of the classifier varies with galactic latitude and with magnitude: as the problem gets harder (crowded fields, fainter objects), the error rate goes up. This is illustrated in the following comparison of SPM stars matched to the GSC2.1. Galactic latitude is shown on the y axis, GSC2 F magnitude is shown on the x axis, and completeness is shown on the z axis.