Automatic detection and verification of solar features

A 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-alpha and CA II K3 line solar images that are obtained from Meudon observatory, covering the period from 2 nd July 2001 till 4 th