Auroral event detection using spatiotemporal statistics of local motion vectors

• Main Authors: Qian, Wang, Jimin, Liang, Zejun, Hu
• Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
• Language: English
• Published: Polar Research Institute of China - PRIC 2013
• Subjects: Space; Advances in Polar Science; Polar Science
• Online Access: http://library.arcticportal.org/2495/; http://library.arcticportal.org/2495/1/A20130306.pdf

The analysis and exploration of auroral dynamics are very significant for studying auroral mechanisms. This paper proposes a method based on auroral dynamic processes for detecting auroral events automatically. We first obtained the motion fields using the multiscale fluid flow estimator. Then, the auroral video frame sequence was represented by the spatiotemporal statistics of local motion vectors. Finally, automatic auroral event detection was achieved. The experimental results show that our methods could detect the required auroral events effectively and accurately, and that the detections were independent on any specific auroral event. The proposed method makes it feasible to statistically analyze a large number of continuous observations based on the auroral dynamic process.