Temporal intensity variations of umbral dots (UDs) and dark nuclei (DNs), and proper motions of UDs, were analyzed in a 4 1/2 hour time series of high resolution white light images of the umbra in a medium-size sunspot (NOAA 7519). The observationsweremade on 5 June 1993 at the SwedishVacuum Solar Telescope, La Palma. An identification and tracking algorithm was applied to UDs observed in a des...

A partial decrease of the convective energy by the magnetic field of a sunspot causes the temperature of the magnetized plasma to decrease and this leads to a magneto-hydrostatic equilibrium. Thus, we expect a strong relation between magnetic field strength of a sunspot and its temperature/brightness. Here, we investigate this relation in the umbra of the large sunspot in NOAA10930 using spectr...

In this paper, we use vertically invariant morphological filters for time-varying or adaptive signal processing. The morphological filters adopted in this paper are vertically invariant openings and closings. Vertically invariant openings and closings have intuitive geometric interpretations and can provide different filtering scales with respect to different spacial positions. Hence, they are ...

This paper deals with the problem of identifying effective occluders for visibility culling. The solid-angle metric is commonly used for measuring the potential significance of occluders from a single viewpoint. In this paper, we show that it does not extend properly to from-region occlusion calculations. We propose to measure the effectiveness of an occluder by means of the size of its umbra. ...

This paper introduces a new concept within shadow segmentation for usage in shadow removal and augmentation through construction of an alpha overlay shadow model. Previously, an image was considered to consist of shadow and non-shadow regions. We construct a model that accounts for sunlit, umbra and penumbra regions. The model is based on theories about color constancy, daylight, and the geomet...