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7.4.3.4 Completeness limit of each detection ¶

As the surface brightness of the objects decreases, the ability to detect them will also decrease. An important statistic is thus the fraction of objects of similar morphology and magnitude that will be detected with our detection algorithm/parameters in a given image. This fraction is known as completeness. For brighter objects, completeness is 1: all bright objects that might exist over the image will be detected. However, as we go to objects of lower overall surface brightness, we will fail to detect a fraction of them, and fainter than a certain surface brightness level (for each morphology), nothing will be detectable in the image: you will need more data to construct a “deeper” image. For a given profile and dataset, the magnitude where the completeness drops below a certain level (usually above \(90\%\)) is known as the completeness limit.

Another important parameter in measuring completeness is purity: the fraction of true detections to all detections. In effect purity is the measure of contamination by false detections: the higher the purity, the lower the contamination. Completeness and purity are anti-correlated: if we can allow a large number of false detections (that we might be able to remove by other means), we can significantly increase the completeness limit.

One traditional way to measure the completeness and purity of a given sample is by embedding mock profiles in regions of the image with no detection. However in such a study we must be really careful to choose model profiles as similar to the target of interest as possible.