Solar Image Processing Workshop IV

The most recent workshop was held in Baltimore MD, 26-30 October 2008. The focus of this meeting was the comparison of computer vision algorithms developed for solar physics applications, and their effective implementation. The meeting attracted around 85 participants (fulfilling pre-meeting expectations), from both the solar physics and image processing communities. Lively workshop groups were held in 4 major areas: eruptive events (coronal mass ejections, prominence eruptions), solar disk features (filaments, sunspots, etc), oscillations in the solar corona (waves and wave mode identification), and solar physics from multiple viewpoints (3-d tomography of coronal mass ejections and reconstruction of active region coronal loop structures).

Two significant developments arose from this meeting. Firstly, the meeting was organized around a new website http://www.sipwork.org, set up not only to handle the organizational aspects of SIPWork IV, but also to act as a central meeting place where the discussion of image processing, computer vision and its application to solar physics can be discussed. At time of writing, the website is undergoing a major revision in order to make it simpler to manage and more directly accessible from social media feeds such as Facebook and Twitter. Secondly, the participants spontaneously agreed to hold an extra splinter session during the meeting, on image/data browsing tools and the availability and accessibility of images and data, with special emphasis on the data volume challenges of SDO. The flexibility of the workshop format we designed can accommodate such spontaneous requests from this solar image processing community. That this request occurred clearly shows that the participants are eager to discuss the data volume challenge of SDO.