journal article·2025-08-16Open access

Self-Supervised Cloud Classification with Patch Rotation Tasks (SSCC-PR)

Wuyang Yan, Xiong Xiong, Xinyuan Xia, Yanchao Zhang, Xiaojie Guo

Applied Sciences· Volume 15· Issue 16

Abstract

Solar irradiance, which is closely influenced by cloud cover, significantly affects photovoltaic (PV) power generation efficiency. To improve cloud type recognition without relying on labeled data tasks, this paper proposes a self-supervised cloud classification method based on patch rotation prediction. In the Pre-training stage, unlabeled ground-based cloud images are augmented through blockwise rotation, and high-level semantic representations are learned via a Swin Transformer encoder. In the fine-tuning stage, these representations are adapted to the cloud classification task using labeled data. Experimental results show that our method achieves 96.61% accuracy on the RCCD and 90.18% on the SWIMCAT dataset, outperforming existing supervised and self-supervised baselines by a clear margin. These results demonstrate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed approach, especially in data-scarce scenarios. This research provides valuable technical support for improving the prediction of solar irradiance and optimizing PV power generation efficiency.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline

Research context

OpenAlex topics: Anomaly Detection Techniques and Applications · Fire Detection and Safety Systems · Data Stream Mining Techniques

SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.

Affiliations

Information and Systems Science Institute, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China

Jiangsu Collaborative Innovation Center of Atmospheric Environment and Equipment Technology, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China

School of Automation, Nanjing University of Information Science and Technology, Nanjing 210044, China

School of Automation, Hangzhou Dianzi University, Hangzhou 310018, China

Funding

National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant · China Postdoctoral Science Foundation · Postgraduate Research and Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province

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