Multiscale Image Processing of Solar Image Data

It is often said that the blessing and curse of solar physics is too much data. Solar missions such as Yohkoh, SOHO and TRACE have shown us the Sun with amazing clarity but have also increased the amount of highly complex data. We have improved our view of the Sun yet we have not improved our analysis techniques. The standard techniques used for analysis of solar images generally consist of observing the evolution of features in a sequence of byte scaled images or a sequence of byte scaled difference images. The determination of features and structures in the images are done qualitatively by the observer. There is little quantitative and objective analysis done with these images. Many advances in image processing techniques have occured in the past decade. Many of these methods are possibly suited for solar image analysis. Multiscale/Multiresolution methods are perhaps the most promising. These methods have been used to formulate the human ability to view and comprehend phenomena on different scales. So these techniques could be used to quantitify the imaging processing done by the observers eyes and brains. In this work we present several applications of multiscale techniques applied to solar image data. Specifically, we discuss uses of the wavelet, curvelet, and related transforms to define a multiresolution support for EIT, LASCO and TRACE images.