A Lightning Optical Automatic Detection Method Based on a Deep Neural Network

Abstract

To achieve automatic recognition of lightning images, which cannot easily be handled using the existing methods and still requires significant human resources, we propose a lightning image dataset and a preprocessing method. The lightning image data over five months were collected using a camera based on two optical observation stations, and then a series of batch labeling methods were applied, which greatly reduced the workload of subsequent manual labeling, and a dataset containing more than 30,000 labeled samples was established. Considering that lightning varies rapidly over time, we propose a time sequence composite (TSC) preprocessing method that inputs lightning’s time-varying characteristics into a model for better recognition of lightning images. The TSC method was evaluated through an experiment on four backbones, and it was found that this preprocessing method enhances the classification performance by 40%. The final trained model could successfully distinguish between the “lightning” and “non-lightning” samples, and a recall rate of 86.5% and a false detection rate of 0.2% were achieved.