Error Analysis and Visibility Classification of Camera-Based Visiometer Using SVM under Nonstandard Conditions

A camera-based visiometer is a promising atmospheric visibility measurement tool because it can meet some specific demands such as the need for visibility monitoring in a strong way, whereas traditional instruments, such as forward scatter-type sensors and transmissometers, can hardly be widely utilized due to their high cost. The camera-based method is used to measure visibility by recording the luminance contrast of the objects in an image. However, lacking standard conditions, they can hardly obtain absolute measurements even with blackbody objects. In this paper, the errors caused by nonstandard conditions in camera-based visiometers with two artificial black bodies are analyzed. The results show that the luminance contrasts of the two blackbodies are highly dependent on the environmental radiance distribution. The nonuniform sky illuminance can cause a large error in the blackbody contrast estimations, leading to substantial visibility measurement errors. A method based on a support vector machine (SVM) is proposed to classify the visibility under nonstandard conditions to ensure the reliability of the camera-based visiometer. A classification accuracy of 96.77% was achieved for the data containing images depicting different illumination conditions (e.g., a clear sky, cloudy sky, and overcast). The results show that the classifier based on the SVM is an effective and reliable method to estimate visibility under complex conditions.