The detection of stellar remnants, as single or binary stars, can provide information on the final stages of stellar evolution. Their study can also offer an insight on the age of the different regions of our Galaxy, in which they are found. My PhD consists of two separate projects, with a main objective to develop methods to detect rare and exotic stellar sources in the Galactic Bulge and Plane, such as low-mass X-ray binaries (LMXBs), high-mass X-ray binaries (HMXBs), cataclysmic variables (CVs) and cool white dwarfs. The most important tool used in this project is astronomical surveys of these regions. They provide all the information required to draw valid scientic conclusions on sources and select the interesting ones for follow-up.

On the one hand, the Chandra Galactic Bulge Survey (GBS) (Jonker et al., 2011) is crossmatched with the VISTA Variables in the Via Lactea (VVV) survey (Minniti et al., 2009), in order to nd the near-infrared counterparts of ~1200 Chandra X-ray sources detected in the Bulge. This region of the sky is extremely crowded and suffers from high extinction, which is why multi-wavelength observations of the X-ray sources is required to disentangle the effect of reddening and the selection of real matches can be more accurate. VVV is one of ESO's (European Southern Observatory) near-infrared public surveys, which is in its very early stages, with no public data releases yet. However, near-infrared colours are insufficient to find the real exotic sources in the Bulge, which is why optical data of the Chandra Galactic Bulge Survey fields are required to distinguish the X-ray binary systems from the single active stars found in those fields.

On the other hand, another survey of the Galactic Plane, the INT Photometric H Survey of the Northern Galactic Plane (IPHAS, (Drew et al., 2005; Gonzalez-Solares et al., 2008)), is very useful to find interesting sources such as CVs and cool white dwarfs. Binary stars with accretion discs are Hα emitters and IPHAS uses an H narrow-band lter to detect such sources. The Galactic Plane has never been subject to a dedicated search for stellar remnants, despite offering substantial benefits over high-latitude regions. Reddening effectively breaks the colour-degeneracy between cool white dwarfs and main-sequence stars of similar temperature. Dust also suppresses the contamination of white dwarf binaries with non-stellar colours by background quasars. We have assembled ugrHαi photometry in a 20 deg^2 overlap between IPHAS and SEGUE, in order to select cool white dwarf and white dwarf binary candidates.

The ultimate goal of both projects is to discover exotic objects, which will be candidates for spectroscopic follow-up to confirm their identities.