Scale-Vector Alignment: A Scale-Aware Framework for Spatially Resolved Morphological Similarity in Astronomical Images
Astronomical maps made with different tracers are not expected to have identical morphology. Excitation, optical depth, chemistry, radiation, and ISM phase alter the response of a tracer, and the resulting differences can depend on both position and spatial scale. We propose scale-vector alignment, a scale-aware method based on Constrained Diffusion Decomposition (CDD). CDD decomposes an image into localized scale components; at each position, their amplitudes define a scale vector that describes how the measured intensity is distributed over spatial scale. We define the pixel-wise similarity $\Spix(x,y)$ as the normalized alignment of two local scale vectors. The normalization removes th...
| Authors | Mengke Zhao, Guang-Xing Li, Keping Qiu et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | astro-ph.IM |
| Published | 21 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 21 September 2026 |
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