Automatic Detection of Low-Surface Brightness Galaxies on Digital Images

Algorithms employed to identify and quantify images on digitised images mostly employ contiguous-pixel (e.g. PISA [based on APM software by Irwin 1985]) or median-filtering techniques and thus miss extended low surface-brightness features. Searches for low surface brightness galaxies (LSBGs) have therefore so far concentrated on eye-ball searches of Schmidt survey plates. To overcome the subjectiveness of eyeball searches and eliminate the inherent problems in current object-detection algorithms we have investigated other techniques.