Using Relevance Feedback in Retrieving Auroral Images

In modern space physics research, digital imagers are widely utilised in studies of the near-Earth space environment. The physical process being directly observed is the aurora, and millions of auroral images are acquired annually. These data sets provide a wealth of opportunities for developing and testing content-based image retrieval (CBIR) techniques with the irregular natural shapes occurring in auroral displays. Our CBIR implementation with relevance feedback was used in searching for one rare auroral form (”North-South structure”) that is a manifestation of an important physical process of general interest to space physics researchers today. We finish with a brief discussion of important benefits of anticipated application of this technique to multi-terabyte multi-million auroral im age data sets.

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