Abstract
The extraction of the kinematic properties of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) from white-light coronagraph images involves a significant degree of user interaction: defining the edge of the event, separating the core from the front or from nearby unrelated structures, etc. To contribute towards a less subjective and more quantitative definition, and therefore better kinematic characterization of such events, we have developed a novel image-processing technique based on the concept of “texture of the event”. The texture is defined by the so-called gray-level co-occurrence matrix, and the technique consists of a supervised segmentation algorithm to isolate a particular region of interest based upon its similarity with a pre-specified model. Once the event is visually defined early in its evolution, it is possible to automatically track the event by applying the segmentation algorithm to the corresponding time series of coronagraph images. In this paper we describe the technique, present some examples, and show how the coronal background, the core of the event, and even the associated shock (if one exists) can be identified for different kind of CMEs detected by the LASCO and SECCHI coronagraphs.
Article PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Avoid common mistakes on your manuscript.
References
Boursier, Y., Llebaria, A., Goudail, F., Lamy, P., Robelus, S.: 2005, Automatic detection of coronal mass ejections on LASCO-C2 synoptic maps. In: Fineschi, S., Viereck, R.A. (eds.) Soc. of Photo – Optical Instr. Eng. (SPIE) Series, CS 5901, 13 – 24. doi:10.1117/12.616011.
Brueckner, G.E., Howard, R.A., Koomen, M.J., Korendyke, C.M., Michels, D.J., Moses, J.D., Socker, D.G., Dere, K.P., Lamy, P.L., Llebaria, A., Bout, M.V., Schwenn, R., Simnett, G.M., Bedford, D.K., Eyles, C.J.: 1995, The large angle spectroscopic coronagraph (LASCO). Solar Phys. 162, 357 – 402. doi:10.1007/BF00733434.
Byrne, J.P., Gallagher, P.T., McAteer, R.T.J., Young, C.A.: 2009, The kinematics of coronal mass ejections using multiscale methods. Astron. Astrophys. 495, 325 – 334. doi:10.1051/0004-6361:200809811.
Chan, T.F., Vese, L.A.: 2001, Active contours without edges. IEEE Trans. Image Process. 10(2), 266 – 277.
Gonzalez, R.C., Woods, R.E.: 2002, Image Processing, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley, Boston. ISBN 0-201-18075-8.
Goussies, N., Mejail, M., Jacobo, J., Stenborg, G.: 2009, Detection and tracking of coronal mass ejections based on supervised segmentation and level sets. Pattern Recog. Lett. doi:10.1016/j.patrec.2009.07.011
Haralick, R.M., Shanmugam, K., Dinstein, I.: 1973, Textural features for image classification. IEEE Trans. Syst. Man Cybern. SMC3, 610 – 621.
Howard, R.A., Moses, J.D., Vourlidas, A., Newmark, J.S., Socker, D.G., Plunkett, S.P., Korendyke, C.M., Cook, J.W., Hurley, A., Davila, J.M., Thompson, W.T., St Cyr, O.C., Mentzell, E., Mehalick, K., Lemen, J.R., Wuelser, J.P., Duncan, D.W., Tarbell, T.D., Wolfson, C.J., Moore, A., Harrison, R.A., Waltham, N.R., Lang, J., Davis, C.J., Eyles, C.J., Mapson-Menard, H., Simnett, G.M., Halain, J.P., Defise, J.M., Mazy, E., Rochus, P., Mercier, R., Ravet, M.F., Delmotte, F., Auchere, F., Delaboudiniere, J.P., Bothmer, V., Deutsch, W., Wang, D., Rich, N., Cooper, S., Stephens, V., Maahs, G., Baugh, R., McMullin, D., Carter, T.: 2008, Sun Earth connection coronal and heliospheric investigation (SECCHI). Space Sci. Rev. 136, 67 – 115. doi:10.1007/s11214-008-9341-4.
Liewer, P.C., Dejong, E.M., Hall, J.R., Lorre, J.J.: 2005, Automatic CME detection from coronagraph image pairs. In: AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts, SH14A-01.
Olmedo, O., Zhang, J., Wechsler, H., Poland, A., Borne, K.: 2008, Automatic detection and tracking of coronal mass ejections in coronagraph time series. Solar Phys. 248, 485 – 499. doi:10.1007/s11207-007-9104-5.
Osher, S., Sethian, J.A.: 1988, Fronts propagating with curvature-dependent speed: algorithms based on Hamilton–Jacobi formulations. J. Comput. Phys. 79, 12 – 49.
Press, W.H., Flannery, B.P., Teukolsky, S.A., Vetterling, W.T.: 1992, Numerical Recipes: The Art of Scientific Computing, 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. ISBN 0-521-43064-X.
Qu, M., Shih, F.Y., Jing, J., Wang, H.: 2006, Automatic detection and classification of coronal mass ejections. Solar Phys. 237, 419 – 431. doi:10.1007/s11207-006-0114-5.
Robbrecht, E., Berghmans, D.: 2004, Automated recognition of coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in near-real-time data. Astron. Astrophys. 425, 1097 – 1106. doi:10.1051/0004-6361:20041302.
Robbrecht, E., Berghmans, D., Van der Linden, R.A.M.: 2009, Automated LASCO CME catalog for solar cycle 23: Are CMEs scale invariant? Astrophys. J. 691, 1222 – 1234. doi:10.1088/0004-637X/691/2/1222.
Shi, J., Malik, J.: 2000, Normalized cuts and image segmentation. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 22(8), 888 – 905.
Shi, Y., Karl, W.: 2005, Real-time tracking using level sets. In: IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2, 34.
Wagner, T.: 1999, Texture analysis. Handbook of Computer Vision and Applications 2, 276 – 308. ISBN 0-12-379772-1.
Yashiro, S., Gopalswamy, N., Michalek, G., St. Cyr, O.C., Plunkett, S.P., Rich, N.B., Howard, R.A.: 2004, A catalog of white light coronal mass ejections observed by the SOHO spacecraft. J. Geophys. Res. 109, 7105. doi:10.1029/2003JA010282.
Zhu, S., Lee, T., Yuille, A.: 1995, Region competition: Unifying snakes, region growing, energy/bayes/mdl for multiband image segmentation. In: Proc. Fifth IEEE Int. Conf. Computer Vision (ICCV), 416 – 423.
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
Goussies, N., Stenborg, G., Vourlidas, A. et al. Tracking of Coronal White-Light Events by Texture. Sol Phys 262, 481–494 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-009-9495-6
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11207-009-9495-6