Inception Network-Based Weather Image Classification with Pre-filtering Process

Visual data (e.g., images/videos) captured from outdoor visual devices are usually degraded by turbid media, such as haze, rain, or snow. Hence, weather conditions would usually disrupt or degrade proper functioning of vision-based applications, such as transportation systems or advanced driver assistance systems, as well as several other outdoor surveillance-based systems. To cope with these problems, removal of weather effects (or the so-called deweathering) from visual data has been critical and received much attention. Therefore, it is important to provide a preprocessing step to automatically decide the current weather condition for input visual data, and then the corresponding proper deweathering operations (e.g., removals of rain or snow) will be properly triggered accordingly. This paper presents an inception network-based weather image classification framework relying on the GoogLeNet by considering the two common weather conditions (with similar characteristics), including rain and snow, in outdoor scenes. For an input image, our method automatically classifies it into one of the two categories or none of them (e.g., sunny or others). We also evaluate the possible impact on image classification performance derived from the image preprocessing via filtering. Extensive experiments conducted on open weather image datasets with/without preprocessing are conducted to evaluate the proposed method and the feasibility has been verified.