Cloud Image Classification Method Based on Deep Convolutional Neural Network

Compared with satellite remote sensing images, ground-based invisible images have limited swath, but featured in higher resolution, more distinct cloud features, and the cost is greatly reduced, conductive to continuous meteorological observation of local areas. For the first time, this paper proposed a high-resolution cloud image classification method based on deep learning and transfer learning technology for ground-based invisible images. Due to the limited amount of samples, traditional classifiers such as support vector machine can't effectively extract the unique features of different types of clouds, and directly training deep convolutional neural networks leads to over-fitting. In order to prevent the network from over-fitting, this paper proposed applying transfer learning method to fine-tune the pre-training model. The proposed network achieved as high as 85.19% test accuracy on 6-type cloud images classification task. The networks proposed in this paper can be applied to classify digital photos captured by cameras directly, which will reduce the cost of system greatly. © 2020 Journal of Northwestern Polytechnical University.