Deep Learning Framework for Precipitation Prediction Using Cloud Images

Precipitation prediction (PP) have become one of the significant research areas of deep learning (DL) and machine vision (MV) techniques are frequently used to predict the weather variables (WV). Since the climate change has left significant impact upon weather variables (WV) and continuously changes are observed in temperature, humidity, cloud patterns and other factors. Although cloud images contain sufficient information to predict the precipitation pattern but due to changes in climate, the complex cloud patterns and rapid shape changing behavior of clouds are difficult to consider for rainfall prediction. Prediction of rainfall would provide more meticulous assistance to the farmers to know about the weather conditions and to care their cash crops. This research proposes a framework to classify the dark cloud patterns (DCP) for prediction of precipitation. The framework consists upon three steps to classify the cloud images, first step tackles noise reduction operations, feature selection and preparation of datasets. Second step construct the decision model by using convolutional neural network (CNN) and third step presents the performance visualization by using confusion matrix, precision, recall and accuracy measures. This research contributes (1) real-world clouds datasets (2) method to prepare datasets (3) highest classification accuracy to predict estimated as 96.90%.