Application of Deep Learning to Solar Data: 6. Super Resolution of SDO/HMI magnetograms

The Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) is the instrument of Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) to study the magnetic field and oscillation at the solar surface. The HMI image is not enough to analyze very small magnetic features on solar surface since it has a spatial resolution of one arcsec. Super resolution is a technique that enhances the resolution of a low resolution image. In this study, we use a method for enhancing the solar image resolution using a Deep-learning model which generates a high resolution HMI image from a low resolution HMI image (4 by 4 binning). Deep learning networks try to find the hidden equation between low resolution image and high resolution image from given input and the corresponding output image. In this study, we trained a model based on a very deep residual channel attention networks (RCAN) with HMI images in 2014 and test it with HMI images in 2015. We find that the model achieves high quality results in view of both visual and measures: 31.40 peak signal-to-noise ratio(PSNR), Correlation Coefficient (0.96), Root mean square error (RMSE) is 0.004. This result is much better than the conventional bi-cubic interpolation. We will apply this model to full-resolution SDO/HMI and GST magnetograms.