On the effect of image denoising on galaxy shape measurements
  Weak gravitational lensing is a very sensitive way of measuring cosmological
parameters, including dark energy, and of testing current theories of
gravitation. In practice, this requires exquisite measurement of the shapes of
billions of galaxies over large areas of the sky, as may be obtained with the
EUCLID and WFIRST satellites. For a given survey depth, applying image
denoising to the data both improves the accuracy of the shape measurements and
increases the number density of galaxies with a measurable shape. We perform
simple tests of three different denoising techniques, using synthetic data. We
propose a new and simple denoising method, based on wavelet decomposition of
the data and a Wiener filtering of the resulting wavelet coefficients. When
applied to the GREAT08 challenge dataset, this technique allows us to improve
the quality factor of the measurement (Q; GREAT08 definition), by up to a
factor of two. We demonstrate that the typical pixel size of the EUCLID optical
channel will allow us to use image denoising.
