An Efficient Solution for Semantic Segmentation of Three Ground-based Cloud Datasets

Abstract

The machine learning approach has shown its state-of-the-art ability to handle segmentation and detection tasks. It is increasingly employed to extract patterns and spatiotemporal features from the ever-increasing stream of Earth system data. However, there is still a significant challenge, which is the generalization capability of the model on cloud images in different types and weather conditions. After studying several popular methods, we propose a semantic segmentation neural network for cloud segmentation. It extracts features learned by source and target domains in an end-to-end behavior, which can address the problem of significant lack of labels in the observed cloud image data. It is further evaluated on the Singapore Whole Sky Image Segmentation (SWIMSEG) dataset by using Mean Intersection-over-Union, recall, F-score, and accuracy matrices. The scores of these matrices are 86%, 97%, 92%, and 96%, which prove that it has excellent efficiency and robustness. Most importantly, a new benchmark based on the SWIMSEG dataset for the task of cloud segmentation is introduced. The others, BENCHMARK, Cirrus Cumulus Stratus Nimbus are evaluated through the model trained from the SWIMSEG dataset by way of visualization.