Comparative Study and Development of Two Contour-Based Image Segmentation Techniques for Coronal Hole Detection in Solar Images

Abstract

The study of solar coronal holes (CHs) is important in the understanding of solar physics and the prediction of space weather events, which have significant impact on space-based instruments, communication and navigation systems. With the availability of the multi-wavelength Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) instrument on board Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) satellite, a large volume of high-resolution solar images are produced continuously. Proper detection of CHs from AIA images is an important issue and recently, a few contour and machine learning-based techniques are found to be promising for such purpose. However, accuracy, time complexity and the requirement of human intervention are some of the critical issues with such methods. In this paper, to address these challenging issues, two contour-based approaches are developed, namely i) the Hough transformed simulated parameterized online region-based active contour method (POR-ACM) and ii) fast fuzzy c-means clustering followed by Hough transformed simulated static contour method (FFCM-SCM). The major issues that are addressed here are automated initialization of contour, reducing time complexity and avoidance of non-coronal hole inside a coronal hole region during contour evolution. The proposed techniques have been tested on three benchmark solar disk images and compared with the existing active contour without edge- (ACWE) based method and fuzzy energy-based dual contour method (FEDCM) of CHs segmentation. The results indicate the capability of the proposed techniques in detection and extraction of CHs in solar disk image with higher accuracy and reduced time complexity. © 2020, Springer Nature B.V.