Deep Learning in Solar Astronomy

The volume of data being collected in solar astronomy has exponentially increased over the past decade and we will be entering the age of petabyte solar data. Deep learning has been an invaluable tool exploited to efficiently extract key information from the massive solar observation data, to solve the tasks of data archiving/classification, object detection and recognition.

Astronomical study starts with imaging from recorded raw data, followed by image processing, such as image reconstruction, inpainting and generation, to enhance imaging quality. We study deep learning for solar image processing. First, image deconvolution is investigated for synthesis aperture imaging. Second, image inpainting is explored to repair over-saturated solar image due to light intensity beyond threshold of optical lens. Third, image translation among UV/EUV observation of the chromosphere/corona, Ha observation of the chromosphere and magnetogram of the photosphere is realized by using GAN, exhibiting powerful image domain transfer ability among multiple wavebands and different observation devices. It can compensate the lack of observation time or waveband. In addition, time series model, e.g., LSTM, is exploited to forecast solar burst and solar activity indices.

This book presents a comprehensive overview of the deep learning applications in solar astronomy. It is suitable for the students and young researchers who are major in astronomy and computer science, especially interdisciplinary research of them.

Prof. Long Xu received his Ph.D. degree from the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in 2009. He was selected into the 100-Talents Plan of CAS in 2014. From 2014 to 2022, he was with the National Astronomical Observatories, CAS. He is currently with both National Space Science Center, CAS and Peng Cheng Laboratory. His research interests include image/video processing, solar radio astronomy, wavelet, machine learning, and computer vision. He has published more than 100 academic papers, and a book “Visual quality assessment by machine learning” with Springer in 2015.