Atom cloud detection and segmentation using a deep neural network

Funder: Royal Society; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000288
Funder: Trinity College, University of Cambridge; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000727
Funder: John Fell Fund, University of Oxford; doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004789
We use a deep neural network (NN) to detect and place region-of-interest (ROI) boxes around ultracold atom clouds in absorption and fluorescence images—with the ability to identify and bound multiple clouds within a single image. The NN also outputs segmentation masks that identify the size, shape and orientation of each cloud from which we extract the clouds’ Gaussian parameters. This allows 2D Gaussian fits to be reliably seeded thereby enabling fully automatic image processing. The method developed performs significantly better than a more conventional method based on a standardized image analysis library (Scikit-image) both for identifying ROI and extracting Gaussian parameters.