Research on 3D Modeling of Solar Features
Solar images, along with other observational data, are very important for solar physicists and space weather researchers aiming to understand the way the Sun works and affects Earth. Much of the data available in solar images are catalogued in terms of solar features and solar activities by different organizations around the world in order to provide researchers with historical changes of the Sun to facilitate research. Almost all of these catalogues are text based and once a researcher decides to investigate a certain activity he or she has to search all the feature catalogues and solar images available during the time of activity to acquire all the relevant data of changes on the Sun.
There is a growing need for automated data analysis and knowledge extraction techniques. One attractive approach is to create automated systems to analyze solar images and extract features that would be used to create corresponding 3D models. These 3D models would provide physical and visual descriptions for the features of interest, which would be more complete than the current text-based descriptions and model specification would require less storage than 2D image segmentation. Such a system would improve interpretation of solar images, since it would enable advanced 3D processing and manipulation to be applied to the modeled solar features. Also such a system would allow us to extract data embedded in various solar images and text based catalogues, and visualize it at the same time.
Our research on 3D modeling of solar features started in mid 2008 and first results are available. Please follow us from this page. First snapshot results from our 3D visualization tool is available below.
