A lower-intensity cellular structure which coincides with the supergranular velocity field. The low-intensity areas between the network boundaries. The texture in the margin at left is from the K-line network. The most apparent objects are the plages. The scientific community does not yet have a deep physical understanding of plages, so precise definitions of their extent are presently out of reach.
Similar statements hold for the network and intranetwork.
The short-term goal of this project is to develop automated methods for finding the plages, network, and intranetwork from images available from several sources. Doing so will immediately allow refinement of models of solar radiation reaching the earth, as well as helping to solve other problems related to sun-earth interactions. In the longer term, a historical database of plage locations, shapes, and sizes would facilitate discovery and understanding of patterns of occurrence and temporal evolution. Segmentation Methods of segmentation now in use amount to thresholding the image, implicitly treating all pixels as independent, resulting in speckled segmentations. We are developing methods incorporating spatial information, such as Markov random field models, into this procedure.