From Galaxy Zoo DECaLS to BASS/MzLS: detailed galaxy morphology classification with unsupervised domain adaption

Abstract

The DESI Legacy Imaging Surveys (DESI-LIS) comprise three distinct surveys: the Dark Energy Camera Legacy Survey (DECaLS), the Beijing-Arizona Sky Survey (BASS), and the Mayall z-band Legacy Survey (MzLS). The citizen science project Galaxy Zoo DECaLS 5 (GZD-5) has provided extensive and detailed morphology labels for a sample of 253,287 galaxies within the DECaLS survey. This dataset has been foundational for numerous deep learning-based galaxy morphology classification studies. However, due to differences in signal-to-noise ratios and resolutions between the DECaLS images and those from BASS and MzLS (collectively referred to as BMz), a neural network trained on DECaLS images cannot be directly applied to BMz images due to distributional mismatch. In this study, we explore an unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) method that fine-tunes a source domain model trained on DECaLS images with GZD-5 labels to BMz images, aiming to reduce bias in galaxy morphology classification within the BMz survey. Our source domain model, used as a starting point for UDA, achieves performance on the DECaLS galaxies' validation set comparable to the results of related works. For BMz galaxies, the fine-tuned target domain model significantly improves performance compared to the direct application of the source domain model, reaching a level comparable to that of the source domain. We also release a catalogue of detailed morphology classifications for 248,088 galaxies within the BMz survey, accompanied by usage recommendations.