We introduce PHEW (Parallel HiErarchical Watershed), a new segmentation algorithm to detect structures in astrophysical fluid simulations, and its implementation into the adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) code RAMSES. PHEW works on the density field defined on the adaptive mesh, and can thus be used on the gas density or the dark matter density after a projection of the particles onto the grid. The algorithm is based on a 'watershed' segmentation of the computational volume into dense regions, followed by a merging of the segmented patches based on the saddle point topology of the density field. PHEW is capable of automatically detecting connected regions above the adopted density threshold, as well as the entire set of substructures within. Our algorithm is fully parallel and uses the MPI library. We describe in great detail the parallel algorithm and perform a scaling experiment which proves the capability of PHEW to run efficiently on massively parallel systems. Future work will add a particle unbinding procedure and the calculation of halo properties onto our segmentation algorithm, thus expanding the scope of PHEW to genuine halo finding.

Context. Current constraints on models of galaxy evolution rely on morphometric catalogs extracted from multi-band photometric surveys. However, these catalogs are altered by selection effects that are difficult to model, that correlate in non trivial ways, and that can lead to contradictory predictions if not taken into account carefully. Aims. To address this issue, we have developed a new approach combining parametric Bayesian indirect likelihood (pBIL) techniques and empirical modeling with realistic image simulations that reproduce a large fraction of these selection effects. This allows us to perform a direct comparison between observed and simulated images and to infer robust constraints on model parameters. Methods. We use a semi-empirical forward model to generate a distribution of mock galaxies from a set of physical parameters. These galaxies are passed through an image simulator reproducing the instrumental characteristics of any survey and are then extracted in the same way as the observed data. The discrepancy between the simulated and observed data is quantified, and minimized with a custom sampling process based on adaptive Markov chain Monte Carlo methods. Results. Using synthetic data matching most of the properties of a Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope Legacy Survey Deep field, we demonstrate the robustness and internal consistency of our approach by inferring the parameters governing the size and luminosity functions and their evolutions for different realistic populations of galaxies. We also compare the results of our approach with those obtained from the classical spectral energy distribution fitting and photometric redshift approach. Conclusions. Our pipeline infers efficiently the luminosity and size distribution and evolution parameters with a very limited number of observables (three photometric bands). When compared to SED fitting based on the same set of observables, our method yields results that are more accurate and free from systematic biases.