Patchy Aurora Image Segmentation Based on ALBP and Block Threshold

The proportion of aurora region to the field of view is an important index to measure the range and scale of aurora. A crucial step to obtain the index is to segment aurora region from the background. A simple and efficient aurora image segmentation algorithm is proposed, which is composed of feature representation based on adaptive local binary patterns (ALBP) and aurora region estimation through block threshold. First the ALBP features of sky image are extracted and the threshold is determined. The aurora image to be segmented is then equally divided into detection blocks from which ALBP features are also extracted. Aurora block is estimated through comparison its ALBP features with the threshold. Simple as it is, processing in huge data set is possible. The experiment illustrates the segmentation effect of the proposed method is satisfying from human visual aspect and segmentation accuracy.