Weather recognition based on 3C-CNN

Abstract

Human activities are often affected by weather conditions. Automatic weather recognition is meaningful to traffic alerting, driving assistance, and intelligent traffic. With the boost of deep learning and AI, deep convolutional neural networks (CNN) are utilized to identify weather situations. In this paper, a three-channel convolutional neural network (3C-CNN) model is proposed on the basis of ResNet50.The model extracts global weather features from the whole image through the ResNet50 branch, and extracts the sky and ground features from the top and bottom regions by two CNN5 branches. Then the global features and the local features are merged by the Concat function. Finally, the weather image is classified by Softmax classifier and the identification result is output. In addition, a medium-scale dataset containing 6,185 outdoor weather images named WeatherDataset-6 is established. 3C-CNN is used to train and test both on the Two-class Weather Images and WeatherDataset-6. The experimental results show that 3C-CNN achieves best on both datasets, with the average recognition accuracy up to 94.35% and 95.81% respectively, which is superior to other classic convolutional neural networks such as AlexNet, VGG16, and ResNet50. It is prospected that our method can also work well for images taken at night with further improvement.