Software kits for measuring photometric redshifts

The advantages of being able to accurately measure redshift with photometric data are of great importance for studying cosmology, large scale structure of the Universe, determination of fundamental astrophysical quantities and so on, because photometric redshifts may provide approximate distances to the enormous set of objects. At present various algorithms for photometric redshifts have been investigated. This is induced us to develop a software platform that integrates different algorithms of estimating photometric redshifts, such as color-magnitude-redshift (CMR), Support Vector Machines (SVMs), HyperZ and Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs). The requirements of the software platform, architectural issues are addressed and its framework design implemented are discussed. It provides a user-friendly interface, by which users can choose the method they like, upload their own data, and then act their needed result by clicking a mouse. This framework is flexible and extensible enough to measure photometric redshifts.