Ground-based image deconvolution with Swin Transformer UNet

Abstract: As ground-based all-sky astronomical surveys will gather millions of images in the coming years, a critical requirement emerges for the development of fast deconvolution algorithms capable of efficiently improving the spatial resolution of these images. By successfully recovering clean and high-resolution images from these surveys, the objective is to deepen the understanding of galaxy formation and evolution through accurate photometric measurements. We introduce a two-step deconvolution framework using a Swin Transformer architecture. Our study reveals that the deep learning-based solution introduces a bias, constraining the scope of scientific analysis. To address this limitation, we propose a novel third step relying on the active coefficients in the sparsity wavelet framework. We conducted a performance comparison between our deep learning-based method and Firedec, a classical deconvolution algorithm, based on an analysis of a subset of the EDisCS cluster samples. We demonstrate the advantage of our method in terms of resolution recovery, generalisation to different noise properties, and computational efficiency. The analysis of this cluster sample not only allowed us to assess the efficiency of our method, but it also enabled us to quantify the number of clumps within these galaxies in relation to their disc colour. This robust technique that we propose holds promise for identifying structures in the distant universe through ground-based images.