In this thesis, several different methods for detecting and removing satellite streaks from astronomic images were evaluated and compared with a new machine learning based approach. Simulated data was generated with a variety of conditions, and the performance of each method was evaluated both quantitatively, using Mean Absolute Error (MAE) against a ground truth detection mask and processing throughput of the method, as well as qualitatively, examining the situations in which each model performs well and poorly. Detection methods from existing systems Pyradon and ASTRiDE were implemented and tested. A machine learning (ML) image segmentation model was trained on simulated data and used to detect streaks in test data. The ML model performed favorably relative to the traditional methods tested, and demonstrated superior robustness in general. However, the model also exhibited some unpredictable behavior in certain scenarios which should be considered. This demonstrated that machine learning is a viable tool for the detection of satellite streaks in astronomic images, however special care must be taken to prevent and to minimize the effects of unpredictable behavior in such models.

The aim of this project is to understand the basic algorithmic components of the transformer deep learning architecture. At a high level, a transformer is a machine learning model based off of a recurrent neural network that adopts a self-attention mechanism, which can weigh significant parts of sequential input data which is very useful for solving problems in natural language processing and computer vision. There are other approaches to solving these problems which have been implemented in the past (i.e., convolutional neural networks and recurrent neural networks), but these architectures introduce the issue of the vanishing gradient problem when an input becomes too long (which essentially means the network loses its memory and halts learning) and have a slow training time in general. The transformer architecture’s features enable a much better “memory” and a faster training time, which makes it a more optimal architecture in solving problems. Most of this project will be spent producing a survey that captures the current state of research on the transformer, and any background material to understand it. First, I will do a keyword search of the most well cited and up-to-date peer reviewed publications on transformers to understand them conceptually. Next, I will investigate any necessary programming frameworks that will be required to implement the architecture. I will use this to implement a simplified version of the architecture or follow an easy to use guide or tutorial in implementing the architecture. Once the programming aspect of the architecture is understood, I will then Implement a transformer based on the academic paper “Attention is All You Need”. I will then slightly tweak this model using my understanding of the architecture to improve performance. Once finished, the details (i.e., successes, failures, process and inner workings) of the implementation will be evaluated and reported, as well as the fundamental concepts surveyed. The motivation behind this project is to explore the rapidly growing area of AI algorithms, and the transformer algorithm in particular was chosen because it is a major milestone for engineering with AI and software. Since their introduction, transformers have provided a very effective way of solving natural language processing, which has allowed any related applications to succeed with high speed while maintaining accuracy. Since then, this type of model can be applied to more cutting edge natural language processing applications, such as extracting semantic information from a text description and generating an image to satisfy it.