Point Source Detection Software in the SKA Era

Abstract

The generation of a sky model for calibration of Square Kilometre Array observations requires a fast method of automatic point source detection and characterisation. In recent years, point source detection in two-dimensional images has been implemented by using several thresholding approaches. In the first phase of the SKA we will need a fast implementation capable of dealing with very large images (80,000 x 80,000 pixels). While the underlying algorithms scale suitably with image size, the present implementations do not. We make some comments on the pertinent trade-offs for scaling these implementations to SKA-levels.