Self-Supervised Learning for Solar Radio Spectrum Classification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning approach for classifying solar radio spectra, improving transfer learning effectiveness and achieving high accuracy with limited labeled data.

Contribution

It proposes a novel self-supervised training method using self-masking, tailored for solar radio spectrum images, enhancing classification performance without extensive labeled datasets.

Findings

Achieves classification accuracy comparable to supervised CNNs and Transformers.

Demonstrates effectiveness of self-supervised learning for solar radio spectrum classification.

Reduces reliance on large labeled datasets for solar radio image analysis.

Abstract

Solar radio observation is an important way to study the Sun. Solar radio bursts contain important information about solar activity. Therefore, real-time automatic detection and classification of solar radio bursts are of great value for subsequent solar physics research and space weather warnings. Traditional image classification methods based on deep learning often require consid-erable training data. To address insufficient solar radio spectrum images, transfer learning is generally used. However, the large difference between natural images and solar spectrum images has a large impact on the transfer learning effect. In this paper, we propose a self-supervised learning method for solar radio spectrum classification. Our method uses self-supervised training with a self-masking approach in natural language processing. Self-supervised learning is more conducive to learning the essential information about images compared with supervised methods, and it is more suitable for transfer learning. First, the method pre-trains using a large amount of other existing data. Then, the trained model is fine-tuned on the solar radio spectrum dataset. Experiments show that the method achieves a classification accuracy similar to that of convolutional neural networks and Transformer networks with supervised training.