Development of an Automatic Program to Analyze Sunspot Groups on SOHO/MDI Continuum Images using OpenCV

Sunspots usually appear in a group which can be classified by certain morphological criteria. In this study we examine the moments which are statistical parameters computed by summing over every pixels of contours, in order to quantify the morphological characteristics of a sunspot group. The moments can be additional characteristics to the sunspot group classification such as McIntosh classification. We are developing a program for image processing, detection of contours and computation of the moments using continuum images from SOHO/MDI. We apply the program to count the sunspot numbers from 303 continuum images in 2003. The sunspot numbers obtained by the program are compared with those by SIDC. The comparison shows that they have a good correlation (r=89%). We are extending this application to automatic sunspot classification (e.g., McIntosh classification) and flare forecasting.