Exploration of U-Net in Automated Solar Coronal Loop Segmentation

This paper presents a deep convolutional neural network (CNN) based method that automatically segments arc-like structures of coronal loops from the intensity images of Sun’s corona. The method explores multiple U-Netarchitecture variants which enable segmentation of coronal loop structures of active regions from NASA’s SolarDynamic Observatory (SDO) imagery. The effectiveness of the method is evaluated through experiments on bothsynthetic and real images, and the results show that the method segments the coronal loop structures accurately.