“We learn the correlations between different parts of the image,” said Lia Medeiros, an astrophysicist and author of the paper, from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ, in an interview with NPR. “And so we do this by analyzing tens of thousands of high-resolution images that are created from simulations. If you have an image, the pixels close to any given pixel are not completely uncorrelated. It’s not that each pixel is doing completely independent things.”
