Carving out the low surface brightness universe with NoiseChisel
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NoiseChisel is a program to detect very low signal-to-noise ratio (S/N) features with minimal assumptions on their morphology. It was introduced in 2015 and released within a collection of data analysis programs and libraries known as GNU Astronomy Utilities (Gnuastro). Over the last ten stable releases of Gnuastro, NoiseChisel has significantly improved: detecting even fainter signal, enabling better user control over its inner workings, and many bug fixes. The most important change may be that NoiseChisel's segmentation features have been moved into a new program called Segment. Another major change is the final growth strategy of its true detections, for example NoiseChisel is able to detect the outer wings of M51 down to S/N of 0.25, or 28.27 mag/arcsec2 on a single-exposure SDSS image (r-band). Segment is also able to detect the localized HII regions as "clumps" much more successfully. Finally, to orchestrate a controlled analysis, the concept of a "reproducible paper" is discussed: this paper itself is exactly reproducible (snapshot v4-0-g8505cfd).
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