Transcript By Soham Chakraborty, Joey Huntley, and Susan Xie The Project The premise was to use SI resources to locate comets in images taken from.

By Soham Chakraborty,
Joey Huntley,
and Susan Xie
The Project
The premise was to use SI resources to
locate comets in images taken from SOHO.
SOHO is a satellite that takes pictures of the
sun. Noise, stars, and comets are visible in
the background, but are not distinguishable
from one another.
All code was to be written in MATLAB, a
numerical computing environment and
programming language.
Original Image
The Process
First, the images were loaded into MATLAB.
Next, the images were processed to show
only white dots representing comets, noise,
and stars against a black background.
Then, we found the coordinates of all the
white dots in each image matrix, which
consisted only of 0’s for black pixels and 1’s
for white pixels.
Processed Image
The Process (2)
Next, we found the differences in time
between subsequent images. These times
varied, but were usually 20-40 minutes.
Since comets move at a constant speed,
around 1 pixel per minute in our images,
we were able to eliminate dots that didn’t
fall in the range. We tracked dot
movements and considered paths over
groups of 4 images.
The Process (3)
We found all the possible paths constrained by the
distance requirements.
Next, we considered the angle over subsequent
images. Comets will move in essentially straight
lines, although some leniency was given. Paths
that weren’t relatively straight were filtered out.
Since SOHO has a circular orbit, the dots that are
stars will appear to move horizontally. All
horizontally moving objects were removed.
The Process (4)
The final consideration was brightness. Fake
comet paths might be found between random
noise dots. Since noise varies in intensity, and
comets do not, we eliminated all dots that varied
significantly in brightness.
MATLAB functions were created to perform each
task. These were then packaged together with a
master function and a program loop that only
allowed a hundred images at a time to be loaded
and processed.
The Results
We ran the final function on a set of images
known to contain comets. While it was not
very efficient and had a long run time, our
program was successful in isolating and
tracing the comets.
Thanks again to our mighty project leader,
Alan Chalker, the master of MATLAB, for all
his help.
THE VISUALIZATION
Using MATLAB, a series of animation frames
were created by using program loops to
essentially take a “shot” of the images in
each step of the visualization.
This resulted in an animation with over 200
frames that displays the comets as they
move across the image groups and green
lines that trace their paths.