An example based image retrieval system for the TRACE repository

The ability to identify particular features and structures, such as faces or types of scenery in images, is a topic with many available applications and potential solutions. In this paper we discuss solar images and the results of our investigation of techniques that can be used to identify solar phenomena in images from the TRACE satellite for the creation of a search engine. Being able to automatically identify and search for various phenomena in solar images is of great interest for scientists studying the sun. We discuss a set of characteristics that can be quickly extracted from solar images. These characteristics are used to create classifiers for various phenomena contained in solar images. The classifiers are then used to create an example based information retrieval system There are many obstacles that need to be overcome when extracting features and creating these classifiers. These include the inherent unbalanced data sets due to varying rates different phenomena appear and multiple phenomenon that could appear in each image.