Unsupervised Automatic Classification of All-sky Auroral Images Using
Deep Clustering Technology
Abstract
Reasonable classification of aurora is of great significance to the
study of the generation mechanism of aurora and the dynamic process of
the magnetosphere boundary layer. Previous aurora classification
studies, both manual and automatic, rely on experts’ visual inspection
and manual labeling of part or all of the data. However, there is
currently no consensus on aurora classification schemes. In this paper,
an auroral image clustering network (AICNet) is proposed to unsupervised
classification of all-sky images for the first time by grouping
observations according to their morphological similarities. Auroral
features are first extracted by deep convolutional auto-encoder, and the
images with similar features are automatically clustered into one group.
AICNet is fully automatic and requires no human supervision to tell the
classification scheme or manually label samples. In the experiments,
4000 dayside all-sky auroral images captured at the Chinese Yellow River
Station during 2003-2008 were considered. The images were clustered into
two classes. The occurrence time of auroras illustrates that images in
one cluster appear a double-peak occurrence distribution and mostly
occur in the afternoon, while images in the other cluster mostly occur
before and at noon. Auroral displays in the two clusters exhibit high
intra-cluster similarity and low inter-cluster similarity in terms of
the overall intensity and morphological structures. Experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed method can discover the internal
structures of auroras and would enable automatic classification of
unprecedented scope without any human supervision.