Automated Technique For Comparison Of Magnetic Field Inversion Lines With Filament Skeletons From The Solar Feature Catalogue

Abstract

We present an automated technique for comparison of magnetic field inversion-line maps from SOHO/MDI magnetograms with solar filament data from the Solar Feature Catalogue created as part of the European Grid of Solar Observations project. The Euclidean distance transform and connected component labelling are used to identify nearest inversion lines to filament skeletons. Several filament inversion-line characteristics are defined and used to automate the decision whether a particular filament/inversion-line pair is suitable for quantitative comparison of orientation and separation. The technique is tested on 551 filaments from 14 Hα images at various dates, and the distributions of angles and distances between filament skeletons and line-of-sight (LOS) magnetic inversion lines are presented for six levels of magnetic field smoothing. The results showed the robustness of the developed technique which can be applied for a statistical analysis of magnetic field in the vicinity of filaments. The method accuracy is limited by the static filament detection which does not distinguish between filaments, fibrils, pre-condensations and filament barbs and this may increase the asymmetries in magnetic distributions and broadening in angular distributions that requires the incorporation of a feature tracking technique.