SIPNet & SAHI: Multiscale Sunspot Extraction for High-Resolution Full Solar Images

Photospheric magnetic fields are manifested as sunspots, which cover various sizes over high-resolution, full-disk, solar continuum images. This paper proposes a novel deep learning method named SIPNet, which is designed to extract and segment multiscale sunspots. It presents a new Switchable Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (SASPP) module based on ASPP, employs an IoU-aware dense object detector, and incorporates a prototype mask generation technique. Furthermore, an open-source framework known as Slicing Aided Hyper Inference (SAHI) is integrated on top of the trained SIPNet model. A comprehensive sunspot dataset is built, containing more than 27,000 sunspots. The precision, recall, and average precision metrics of the SIPNet & SAHI method were measured as 95.7%, 90.2%, and 96.1%, respectively. The results indicate that the SIPNet & SAHI method has good performance in detecting and segmenting large-scale sunspots, particularly in small and ultra-small sunspots. The method also provides a new solution for solving similar problems.