BibTeX

@article{2412.08716v3,
Author        = {Silvan Fischbacher and Beatrice Moser and Tomasz Kacprzak and Luca Tortorelli and Joerg Herbel and Claudio Bruderer and Uwe Schmitt and Alexandre Refregier and Joel Berge and Lukas Gamper and Adam Amara},
Title         = {UFig v1: The ultra-fast image generator},
Eprint        = {2412.08716v3},
DOI           = {10.21105/joss.08697},
ArchivePrefix = {arXiv},
PrimaryClass  = {astro-ph.IM},
Abstract      = {With the rise of simulation-based inference (SBI) methods, simulations need
to be fast as well as realistic. $\texttt{UFig v1}$ is a public Python package
that simulates astronomical images with exceptional speed, taking approximately
the same time as source extraction. This makes it particularly well-suited for
SBI methods where computational efficiency is crucial. To render an image,
$\texttt{UFig}$ requires a galaxy catalog, and a description of the point
spread function (PSF). It can also add background noise, sample stars using the
Besan\c{c}on model of the Milky Way, and run $\texttt{SExtractor}$ to extract
sources from the rendered image. The extracted sources can be matched to the
intrinsic catalog, flagged based on $\texttt{SExtractor}$ output and survey
masks, and emulators can be used to bypass the image simulation and extraction
steps. A first version of $\texttt{UFig}$ was presented in Berg\'e et al.
(2013) and the software has since been used and further developed in a variety
of forward modelling applications.},
Year          = {2024},
Month         = {Dec},
Note          = {Journal of Open Source Software, 10(113), 8697 (2025)},
Url           = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2412.08716v3},
File          = {2412.08716v3.pdf}
}