TY - JOUR
T1 - Automatic Solar Filament Segmentation and Characterization
AU - Yuan, Y.
AU - Shih, Frank
AU - Jing, Ju
AU - Wang, Haimin
AU - Chae, J.
N1 - Funding Information:
Acknowledgements This work was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (KRF-2008-220-C00022). The authors thank the Big Bear Solar Observatory in California (BBSO), Kanzelhöhe Solar Observatory in Austria (KANZ), Catania Astrophysical Observatory in Italy(OACT), and the Yunnan Astronomical Observatory in China (YNAO) for providing Hα full-disk solar images for this study. The authors thank the Global High-Resolution H-alpha Network for providing a centralized Hα images web hosting service.
PY - 2011/8
Y1 - 2011/8
N2 - This paper presents a generic method to automatically segment and characterize solar filaments from various Hα full-disk solar images, obtained by different solar observatories, with different dynamic ranges and statistical properties. First, a cascading Hough circle detector is designed to find the center location and radius of the solar disks. Second, polynomial surface fitting is adopted to correct unbalanced luminance. Third, an adaptive thresholding method is put forward to segment solar filaments. Finally, for each piece of a solar filament, its centroid location, area, and length are characterized, in which morphological thinning and graph theory are used for identifying the main skeletons of filaments. To test the performance of the proposed methods, a dataset composed of 125 Hα images is considered. These images were obtained by four solar observatories from January 2000 to May 2010, one image per month. Experimental results show that the accuracy rate is above 95% as measured by filament number and above 99% as measured by filament area, indicating that only a few tiny filaments are not detected.
AB - This paper presents a generic method to automatically segment and characterize solar filaments from various Hα full-disk solar images, obtained by different solar observatories, with different dynamic ranges and statistical properties. First, a cascading Hough circle detector is designed to find the center location and radius of the solar disks. Second, polynomial surface fitting is adopted to correct unbalanced luminance. Third, an adaptive thresholding method is put forward to segment solar filaments. Finally, for each piece of a solar filament, its centroid location, area, and length are characterized, in which morphological thinning and graph theory are used for identifying the main skeletons of filaments. To test the performance of the proposed methods, a dataset composed of 125 Hα images is considered. These images were obtained by four solar observatories from January 2000 to May 2010, one image per month. Experimental results show that the accuracy rate is above 95% as measured by filament number and above 99% as measured by filament area, indicating that only a few tiny filaments are not detected.
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U2 - 10.1007/s11207-011-9798-2
DO - 10.1007/s11207-011-9798-2
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:79961021067
SN - 0038-0938
VL - 272
SP - 101
EP - 117
JO - Solar Physics
JF - Solar Physics
IS - 1
ER -