Instance Segmentation of Auroral Images for Automatic Computation of Arc Width

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The width of auroral arc is one of the most important factors in understanding and examining its physical mechanisms. In this letter, we propose a fully automatic method for computing the width of auroral arcs based on the instance segmentation of auroral images. To accurately detect and segment auroral arcs with oriented bounding boxes, we adapt a state-of-the-art instance segmentation model, Mask region-based convolutional neural network, by designing a two-stage inference process combined with an indispensable random rotation training strategy and designing an effective feature extraction architecture. Given the segmented masks of individual auroral arcs, we present a method for computing the arc width automatically. In our experiments, the instance segmentation model achieves 86.8% of mean average precision on the human-labeled data set. By automatically evaluating the width of 29 938 detected auroral arcs in 18 417 auroral arc images, we obtain a similar arc width distribution to that evaluated by the semiautomatic approach, which demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed method.