Information field theory – turning data into images

Charting the Universe from measurements is a challenging information theoretical problem. The finite data provided by instruments is never able to constraint the infinite degrees of freedom of the physical fields we are interested in astronomy or other areas. Additional information like physical laws and empirical correlations has to be folded into the field inference. Information field theory (IFT) is information theory for field inference enabling the consistent fusion of measurement data and theoretical concepts exploiting techniques developed for quantum field theory. IFT provides optimal methods to generate images exploiting all available information. Existing applications of IFT in astrophysics are galactic tomography, gamma- and radio- astronomical imaging, and the analysis of cosmic microwave background data. Applications in preparation are inferring the dynamics of an observed field and the fusion of measurements from complementary instruments into coherent pictures.