Automatic Spotrecognition

Due to the change from photographic film to CCD cameras a new world of posibilities for image processing was opened. When the seeing is good the quality of our white light images taken by the photosphere camera is very high. Therefore we made attempts to detect Sunspots automatically. But without the help of a small program written by Fraser Watson from the Department of Physics & Astronomy of the University of Glasgow, Scotland, and Prof. Stephen Marshall from the University of Strathclyde the results would not have been so satisfying. The algorithm is based on work arising from this paper by groups at Universities of Glasgow, Lancaster and Strathclyde.
In principle the necessary information is obtained by morphological image processing, in our case mainly by an erosion following a dilation (= Tophat transformation). The program is still in experimental stadium - nonetheless we want to present our first results.