Classification and understanding of cloud structures via satellite
images with EfficientUNet
Abstract
Climate change has been a common interest and the forefront of crucial
political discussion and decision-making for many years. Shallow clouds
play a significant role in understanding the Earth’s climate but they
are challenging to interpret and represent in a climate model. By
classifying these cloud structures there is a better possibility of
understanding the physical structures of the clouds which would improve
the climate model generation resulting in a better prediction of climate
change or forecasting weather update. Clouds organise in many forms
which makes it challenging to build traditional rule-based algorithms to
separate cloud features. In this paper classification of cloud
organization patterns was performed using a new scaled-up version of
Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) named as EfficientNet as the encoder
and UNet as decoder where they worked as feature extractor and
reconstructor of fine grained feature map and was used as a classifier
which will help experts to understand how clouds will shape the future
climate. By using a segmentation model in a classification task it was
shown that with a good encoder alongside UNet it is possible to obtain
good performance from this dataset. Dice coefficient has been used for
the final evaluation metric which gave the score of 66.26% and 66.02%
for public and private (test set) leaderboard on Kaggle competition
respectively.