An accurate and practical method for inference of weak gravitational lensing from galaxy images

Abstract: We demonstrate highly accurate recovery of weak gravitational lensing shear using an implementation of the Bayesian Fourier Domain (BFD) method proposed by Bernstein & Armstrong (2014, BA14), extended to correct for selection biases. The BFD formalism is rigorously correct for Nyquist-sampled, background-limited, uncrowded image of background galaxies. BFD does not assign shapes to galaxies, instead compressing the pixel data D into a vector of moments M, such that we have an analytic expression for the probability P(M|g) of obtaining the observations with gravitational lensing distortion g along the line of sight. We implement an algorithm for conducting BFD's integrations over the population of unlensed source galaxies which measures ~10 galaxies/second/core with good scaling properties. Initial tests of this code on ~10^9 simulated lensed galaxy images recover the simulated shear to a fractional accuracy of m=0.0021+-0.0004, substantially more accurate than has been demonstrated previously for any generally applicable method. Deep sky exposures generate a sufficiently accurate approximation to the noiseless, unlensed galaxy population distribution assumed as input to BFD. Potential extensions of the method include simultaneous measurement of magnification and shear; multiple-exposure, multi-band observations; and joint inference of photometric redshifts and lensing tomography.