AN AUTOMATIC DETECTION METHOD FOR EXTREME-ULTRAVIOLET DIMMINGS ASSOCIATED WITH SMALL-SCALE ERUPTION

Small-scale extreme-ultraviolet (EUV) dimming often surrounds sites of energy release in the quiet Sun. This paper describes a method for the automatic detection of these small-scale EUV dimmings using a feature-based classifier. The method is demonstrated using sequences of 171 A images taken by the STEREO/Extreme UltraViolet Imager (EUVI) on 2007 June 13 and by Solar Dynamics Observatory/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly on 2010 August 27. The feature identification relies on recognizing structure in sequences of space-time 171 A images using the Zernike moments of the images. The Zernike moments space-time slices with events and non-events are distinctive enough to be separated using a support vector machine (SVM) classifier. The SVM is trained using 150 events and 700 non-event space-time slices. We find a total of 1217 events in the EUVI images and 2064 events in the AIA images on the days studied. Most of the events are found between latitudes –35° and +35°. The sizes and expansion speeds of central dimming regions are extracted using a region grow algorithm. The histograms of the sizes in both EUVI and AIA follow a steep power law with slope of about –5. The AIA slope extends to smaller sizes before turning over. The mean velocity of 1325 dimming regions seen by AIA is found to be about 14 km s–1.