How is the Weather: Automatic Inference from Images

Low-cost monitoring cameras/webcams provide unique visual information. To take advantage of the vast image dataset captured by a typical webcam, we consider the problem of retrieving weather information from a database of still images. The task is to automatically label all images with different weather conditions (e.g., sunny, cloudy, and overcast), using limited human assistance. To address the drawbacks in existing weather prediction algorithms, we first apply image segmentation to the raw images to avoid disturbance of the non-sky region. Then, we propose to use multiple kernel learning to gather and select an optimal subset of image features from a certain feature pool. To further increase the recognition performance, we adopt multi-pass active learning for selecting the training set. The experimental results show that our weather recognition system achieves high performance.