Abstract
A maximum a posteriori (MAP) technique is developed to identify solar features in cotemporal and cospatial images of line-of-sight magnetic flux, continuum intensity, and equivalent width observed with the NASA/National Solar Observatory (NSO) Spectromagnetograph (SPM). The technique facilitates human understanding of patterns in large data sets and enables systematic studies of feature characteristics for comparison with models and observations of long-term solar activity and variability. The method uses Bayes’ rule to compute the posterior probability of any feature segmentation of a trio of observed images from per-pixel, class-conditional probabilities derived from independently-segmented training images. Simulated annealing is used to find the most likely segmentation. New algorithms for computing class-conditional probabilities from three-dimensional Gaussian mixture models and interpolated histogram densities are described and compared. A new extension to the spatial smoothing in the Bayesian prior model is introduced, which can incorporate a spatial dependence such as center-to-limb variation. How the spatial scale of training segmentations affects the results is discussed, and a new method for statistical separation of quiet Sun and quiet network is presented.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Bloomfield, D.S., McAteer, R.T.J., Mathioudakis, M., Williams, D.R., Keenan, F.P.: 2004, Astrophys. J. 604, 936. doi: 10.1086/382062 .
Boykov, Y., Veksler, O., Zabih, R.: 2001, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 23(11), 1222.
Cadavid, A.C., Lawrence, J.K., Ruzmaikin, A.: 2008, Solar Phys. 248, 247. doi: 10.1007/s11207-007-9026-2 .
Crouch, A., Barnes, G., Leka, K.: 2009, Solar Phys. 260, 271.
Curto, J.J., Blanca, M., Martínez, E.: 2008, Solar Phys. 250, 411. doi: 10.1007/s11207-008-9224-6 .
de Toma, G., White, O.R., Chapman, G.A., Walton, S.R., Preminger, D.G., Cookson, A.M., Harvey, K.L.: 2001, Astrophys. J. Lett. 549. L131. doi: 10.1086/319127 .
de Toma, G., White, O.R., Chapman, G.A., Walton, S.R., Preminger, D.G., Cookson, A.M.: 2004, Astrophys. J. 609, 1140. doi: 10.1086/421104 .
Ermolli, I., Berrilli, F., Florio, A.: 2000, In: Wilson, A. (ed.) The Solar Cycle and Terrestrial Climate, Solar and Space Weather SP-463, ESA, Noordwijk, 313.
Ermolli, I., Criscuoli, S., Centrone, M., Giorgi, F., Penza, V.: 2007, Astron. Astrophys. 465, 305. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361:20065995 .
Foukal, P., Lean, J.: 1988, Astrophys. J. 328, 347. doi: 10.1086/166297 .
Gelman, A., Jakulin, A., Grazia Pittau, M., Su, Y.S.: 2008, Ann. Appl. Stat. 2(4), 1360. doi: 10.1214/08-AOAS191 .
Geman, S., Geman, D.: 1984, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 6, 721.
Geman, S., Bienenstock, E., Doursat, R.: 1992, Neural Comput. 4(1), 1.
Gorsuch, R.L.: 1983, Factor Analysis, 2nd edn. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale.
Gyori, L.: 1998, Solar Phys. 180, 109.
Gyori, L., Baranyi, T., Turmon, M., Pap, J.: 2004, Adv. Space Res. 34, 269.
Harvey, K.L., White, O.R.: 1999, Astrophys. J. 515, 812. doi: 10.1086/307035 . Cited in text as HW1999.
Hastie, T., Tibshirani, R.: 1996, J. Roy. Stat. Soc. (B) 58(1), 155.
Jones, H.P., Ceja, J.A.: 2001, In: Sigwarth, M. (ed.) Advanced Solar Polarimetry – Theory, Observation, and Instrumentation CS-236, Astron. Soc. Pac., San Francisco, 87.
Jones, H.P., Duvall, T.L. Jr., Harvey, J.W., Mahaffey, C.T., Schwitters, J.D., Simmons, J.E.: 1992, Solar Phys. 139, 211.
Jones, H.P., Branston, D.D., Jones, P.B., Wills-Davey, M.J.: 2000, Astrophys. J. 529, 1070.
Jones, H.P., Branston, D.D., Jones, P.B., Popescu, M.D.: 2003, Astrophys. J. 589, 658.
Jones, H.P., Chapman, G.A., Harvey, K.L., Pap, J.M., Preminger, D.G., Turmon, M.J., Walton, S.R.: 2008, Solar Phys. 248, 323.
Krivova, N.A., Solanki, S.K., Fligge, M., Unruh, Y.C.: 2003, Astron. Astrophys. 399, 1. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361:20030029 .
Li, S.Z.: 2009, Markov Random Field Modeling in Image Analysis, 3rd edn. Springer, New York.
Lugosi, G., Nobel, A.: 1996, Ann. Stat. 24(2), 687.
McAteer, R.T.J., Gallagher, P.T., Ireland, J., Young, C.A.: 2005, Solar Phys. 228, 55. doi: 10.1007/s11207-005-4075-x .
McLachlan, G., Peel, D.: 2000, Finite Mixture Models, Wiley, New York.
Pap, J.M., Turmon, M., Floyd, L., Fröhlich, C., Wehrli, C.: 2002, Adv. Space Res. 29, 1923. doi: 10.1016/S0273-1177(02)00237-5 .
Pham, D.L., Xu, C., Prince, J.L.: 2000, Annu. Rev. Biomed. Eng. 2, 315. doi: 10.1146/annurev.bioeng.2.1.315 .
Preminger, D.G., Walton, S.R., Chapman, G.A.: 2001, Solar Phys. 202, 53.
Preminger, D.G., Walton, S.R., Chapman, G.A.: 2002, J. Geophys. Res. 107, 6. doi: 10.1029/2001JA009169 .
Ripley, B.D.: 1988, Statistical Inference for Spatial Processes, Cambridge Univ. Press, New York.
Schrijver, K., Hurlburt, N., Mark, C., Freeland, S., Green, S., Jaffey, A., Kobashi, A., Schiff, D., Seguin, R., Slater, G., Somani, A., Timmons, R.: 2008, AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, 1619.
Scott, D.W.: 1992, Multivariate Density Estimation: Theory, Practice, and Visualization, Wiley, New York.
Simonoff, J.S.: 1998, Smoothing Methods in Statistics, corrected edn. Springer, New York.
Turmon, M.: 2004, In: Antoch, J. (ed.) Compstat 2004 – Proceedings in Computational Statistics, Physica, Heidelberg, 1909.
Turmon, M.J., Pap, J.M.: 1997, In: Babu, G.J., Feigelson, E.D. (eds.) Proc. Second Conf. on Statistical Challenges in Modern Astronomy, Springer, New York, 408.
Turmon, M., Mukhtar, S., Pap, J.: 1997, In: Heckerman, D., Mannila, H., Pregibon, D., Uthurusamy, R. (eds.) Proc. Third Conf. on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, MIT Press, Cambridge, 267.
Turmon, M., Pap, J., Mukhtar, S.: 2002, Astrophys. J. 568(1), 396. doi: 10.1086/338681 . Cited in text as TPM2002.
Wenzler, T., Solanki, S.K., Krivova, N.A., Fröhlich, C.: 2006, Astron. Astrophys. 460, 583. doi: 10.1051/0004-6361:20065752 .
Worden, J.R., White, O.R., Woods, T.N.: 1998, Astrophys. J. 496, 998. doi: 10.1086/305392 .
Zhang, Y., Brady, M., Smith, S.: 2001, IEEE Trans. Med. Imaging 20(1), 45.
Zharkova, V.V., Aboudarham, J., Zharkov, S., Ipson, S.S., Benkhalil, A.K., Fuller, N.: 2005, Solar Phys. 228, 361. doi: 10.1007/s11207-005-5623-0 .
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Solar Image Processing and Analysis
Guest Editors: J. Ireland and C.A. Young.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Turmon, M., Jones, H.P., Malanushenko, O.V. et al. Statistical Feature Recognition for Multidimensional Solar Imagery. Sol Phys 262, 277–298 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-009-9490-y
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-009-9490-y