Automatic Detection and Verification of Solar Features

YesA fast hybrid system for the automated detection and verification of active regions (plages) and filaments in solar images is presented in this paper. The system combines automated image processing with machine learning. The imaging part consists of five major stages. The solar disk is detected in the first stage, using a morphological hit-miss transform, watershed transform and Filling algorithm. An image-enhancement technique is introduced to remove the limb-darkening effect and intensity filtering is implemented followed by a modified region-growing technique to detect the regions of interest (RoI). The algorithms are tested on H- and CA II K3-line solar images that are obtained from Meudon Observatory, covering the period from July 2, 2001 till August 4, 2001. The detection algorithm is fast and it achieves false acceptance rate (FAR) error rate of 67% and false rejection rate (FRR) error rate of 3% for active regions, and FAR error rate of 19% and FRR error rate of 14% for filaments, when compared with the manually detected filaments in the synoptic maps. The detection performance is enhanced further using a neural network (NN), which is trained on statistical features extracted from the RoI and non-RoI. With the use of this combination the FAR has dropped to 2% for active regions and 4% for filaments.© 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Int J Imaging Syst Technol, 15, 199-210, 200

Automated Coronal Hole Identification via Multi-Thermal Intensity Segmentation

Coronal holes (CH) are regions of open magnetic fields that appear as dark areas in the solar corona due to their low density and temperature compared to the surrounding quiet corona. To date, accurate identification and segmentation of CHs has been a difficult task due to their comparable intensity to local quiet Sun regions. Current segmentation methods typically rely on the use of single EUV passband and magnetogram images to extract CH information. Here, the Coronal Hole Identification via Multi-thermal Emission Recognition Algorithm (CHIMERA) is described, which analyses multi-thermal images from the Atmospheric Image Assembly (AIA) onboard the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to segment coronal hole boundaries by their intensity ratio across three passbands (171 \AA, 193 \AA, and 211 \AA). The algorithm allows accurate extraction of CH boundaries and many of their properties, such as area, position, latitudinal and longitudinal width, and magnetic polarity of segmented CHs. From these properties, a clear linear relationship was identified between the duration of geomagnetic storms and coronal hole areas. CHIMERA can therefore form the basis of more accurate forecasting of the start and duration of geomagnetic storms

Developing Experimental Models for NASA Missions with ASSL

NASA's new age of space exploration augurs great promise for deep space exploration missions whereby spacecraft should be independent, autonomous, and smart. Nowadays NASA increasingly relies on the concepts of autonomic computing, exploiting these to increase the survivability of remote missions, particularly when human tending is not feasible. Autonomic computing has been recognized as a promising approach to the development of self-managing spacecraft systems that employ onboard intelligence and rely less on control links. The Autonomic System Specification Language (ASSL) is a framework for formally specifying and generating autonomic systems. As part of long-term research targeted at the development of models for space exploration missions that rely on principles of autonomic computing, we have employed ASSL to develop formal models and generate functional prototypes for NASA missions. This helps to validate features and perform experiments through simulation. Here, we discuss our work on developing such missions with ASSL.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures, Workshop on Formal Methods for Aerospace (FMA'09

Signature Verification Approach using Fusion of Hybrid Texture Features

In this paper, a writer-dependent signature verification method is proposed. Two different types of texture features, namely Wavelet and Local Quantized Patterns (LQP) features, are employed to extract two kinds of transform and statistical based information from signature images. For each writer two separate one-class support vector machines (SVMs) corresponding to each set of LQP and Wavelet features are trained to obtain two different authenticity scores for a given signature. Finally, a score level classifier fusion method is used to integrate the scores obtained from the two one-class SVMs to achieve the verification score. In the proposed method only genuine signatures are used to train the one-class SVMs. The proposed signature verification method has been tested using four different publicly available datasets and the results demonstrate the generality of the proposed method. The proposed system outperforms other existing systems in the literature.Comment: Neural Computing and Applicatio