Automatic detection of low surface brightness galaxies from SDSS images

Abstract: Low surface brightness (LSB) galaxies are galaxies with central surface brightness fainter than the night sky. Due to the faint nature of LSB galaxies and the comparable sky background, it is difficult to search LSB galaxies automatically and efficiently from large sky survey. In this study, we established the Low Surface Brightness Galaxies Auto Detect model (LSBG-AD), which is a data-driven model for end-to-end detection of LSB galaxies from Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) images. Object detection techniques based on deep learning are applied to the SDSS field images to identify LSB galaxies and estimate their coordinates at the same time. Applying LSBG-AD to 1120 SDSS images, we detected 1197 LSB galaxy candidates, of which 1081 samples are already known and 116 samples are newly found candidates. The B-band central surface brightness of the candidates searched by the model ranges from 22 mag arcsec $^ {- 2} $ to 24 mag arcsec $^ {- 2} $, quite consistent with the surface brightness distribution of the standard sample. 96.46\% of LSB galaxy candidates have an axis ratio ($b/a$) greater than 0.3, and 92.04\% of them have $fracDev_r$\textless 0.4, which is also consistent with the standard sample. The results show that the LSBG-AD model learns the features of LSB galaxies of the training samples well, and can be used to search LSB galaxies without using photometric parameters. Next, this method will be used to develop efficient algorithms to detect LSB galaxies from massive images of the next generation observatories.