Hybrid Imaging and Neural Networks Techniques for Processing Solar Images

Solar imaging is currently an active area of research. A fast hybrid system for the automated detection of filaments in solar images is presented in this paper. The system includes three major stages. The central solar region is detected in the first stage using integral projections. Intensity filtering and image enhancement techniques are implemented in the second stage to enhance the quality of detection in the central region. Local detection windows are implemented in the third stage to detect the positions of filaments and to define various sized arrays to contain them. The extracted arrays are fed later to a neural network for verification purposes.