Bad pixel modified interpolation for astronomical images

Abstract

We present a new method of interpolation for the pixel brightness estimation in astronomical images. Our new method is simple and easily implementable. We show the comparison of this method with the widely used linear interpolation and other interpolation algorithms using one thousand astronomical images obtained from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. The comparison shows that our method improves bad pixels brightness estimation with four times lower mean error than the presently most popular linear interpolation and has a better performance than any other examined method. The presented idea is flexible and can be also applied to presently used and future interpolation methods. The proposed method is especially useful for large sky surveys image reduction but can be also applied to single image correction.