Improving cloud type classification of ground-based images using region covariance descriptors

Abstract

Abstract. The distribution and frequency of occurrence of different cloud types affect the energy balance of the Earth. Automatic cloud type classification of images continuously observed by the ground-based imagers could help climate researchers find the relationship between cloud type variations and climate change. However, by far it is still a huge challenge to design a powerful discriminative classifier for cloud categorization. To tackle this difficulty, in this paper, we present an improved method with region covariance descriptors (RCovDs) and the Riemannian bag-of-feature (BoF) method. RCovDs model the correlations among different dimensional features, which allows for a more discriminative representation. BoF is extended from Euclidean space to Riemannian manifold by k-means clustering, in which Stein divergence is adopted as a similarity metric. The histogram feature is extracted by encoding RCovDs of the cloud image blocks with a BoF-based codebook. The multiclass support vector machine (SVM) is utilized for the recognition of cloud types. The experiments on the ground-based cloud image datasets show that a very high prediction accuracy (more than 98 % on two datasets) can be obtained with a small number of training samples, which validate the proposed method and exhibit the competitive performance against state-of-the-art methods.