AUTOMATIC LIGHTNING WHISTLER DETECTION USING CONNECTED COMPONENT LABELING METHOD

The Earth’s atmosphere contains many natural phenomena, one of them is lightning whistler. This phenomena is electromagnetic waves that occurs shortly after the occurrence of lightning and it propagates in the ionosphere and magnetosphere. It propagates with different speed resulting sound like a whistling at radio frequency and is commonly known as whistler wave. Some benefits on this research of whistler wave is for global communications, lightning geolocation, ground-to-satellite communications, satellite protection and many more. An effort to analyze the whistler waves is to detect patterns of whistling from whistler wave. For being able to detect the pattern of whistler, it must be converted into spectrogram image. In the detection process, spectrogram image goes through a noises removal process using image processing methods such as adaptive thresholding method, median filter and opening method. Noises removal process aims to remove or reduce the noises in the spectrogram image. Then, spectrogram image will be labeled and detected using connected component labeling method, the detection results are waves pattern that has marked with red border boxes and also a number of wave patterns detected. By using image processing, connected component labeling method and then applied with Matlab programming language, the pattern of whistler can be detected easily and faster.