MASK-CNN-Transformer For Real-Time Multi-Label Weather Recognition
This addresses weather recognition for applications like traffic safety and meteorology, but it is incremental as it builds on existing Transformer and CNN methods with a novel masking approach.
The paper tackles multi-label weather recognition by proposing MASK-CT, a model combining CNNs, Transformers, and a MASK mechanism to handle co-occurrence dependencies, achieving state-of-the-art performance on real-world datasets and enabling high-speed real-time recognition.
Weather recognition is an essential support for many practical life applications, including traffic safety, environment, and meteorology. However, many existing related works cannot comprehensively describe weather conditions due to their complex co-occurrence dependencies. This paper proposes a novel multi-label weather recognition model considering these dependencies. The proposed model called MASK-Convolutional Neural Network-Transformer (MASK-CT) is based on the Transformer, the convolutional process, and the MASK mechanism. The model employs multiple convolutional layers to extract features from weather images and a Transformer encoder to calculate the probability of each weather condition based on the extracted features. To improve the generalization ability of MASK-CT, a MASK mechanism is used during the training phase. The effect of the MASK mechanism is explored and discussed. The Mask mechanism randomly withholds some information from one-pair training instances (one image and its corresponding label). There are two types of MASK methods. Specifically, MASK-I is designed and deployed on the image before feeding it into the weather feature extractor and MASK-II is applied to the image label. The Transformer encoder is then utilized on the randomly masked image features and labels. The experimental results from various real-world weather recognition datasets demonstrate that the proposed MASK-CT model outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Furthermore, the high-speed dynamic real-time weather recognition capability of the MASK-CT is evaluated.