Stellar classification is an important topic in astronomical tasks such as the study of stellar populations. However, stellar classification of a region of the sky is a time-consuming process due to the large amount of objects present in an image. Therefore, automatic techniques to speed up the process are required. In this work, we study the application of a sparse representation and a dictionary learning for automatic spectral stellar classification. Our dataset consist of 529 calibrated stellar spectra of classes B to K, belonging to the Pulkovo Spectrophotometric catalog, in the 3400 − 5500Å range. These stellar spectra are used for both training and testing of the proposed methodology. The sparse technique is applied by using the greedy algorithm OMP (Orthogonal Matching Pursuit) for finding an approximated solution, and the K-SVD (K-Singular Value Decomposition) for the dictionary learning step. Thus, sparse classification is based on the recognition of the common characteristics of a particular stellar type through the construction of a trained basis. In this work, we propose a classification criterion that evaluates the results of the sparse representation techniques and determines the final classification of the spectra. This methodology demonstrates its ability to achieve levels of classification comparable

The observation of celestial objects in the sky is a practice that helps astronomers to understand the way in which the Universe is structured. However, due to the large number of observed objects with modern telescopes, the analysis of these by hand is a difficult task. An important part in galaxy research is the morphological structure classification based on the Hubble sequence. In this research, we present an approach to solve the morphological galaxy classification problem in an automatic way by using the Sparse Representation technique and dictionary learning with K-SVD. For the tests in this work, we use a database of galaxies extracted from the Principal Galaxy Catalog (PGC) and the APM Equatorial Catalogue of Galaxies obtaining a total of 2403 useful galaxies. In order to represent each galaxy frame, we propose to calculate a set of 20 features such as Hu's invariant moments, galaxy nucleus eccentricity, gabor galaxy ratio and some other features commonly used in galaxy classification. A stage of feature relevance analysis was performed using Relief-f in order to determine which are the best parameters for the classification tests using 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7 galaxy classes making signal vectors of different length values with the most important features. For the classification task, we use a 20-random cross-validation technique to evaluate classification accuracy with all signal sets achieving a score of 82.27 % for 2 galaxy classes and up to 44.27 % for 7 galaxy classes.

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