USF-Net: A Unified Spatiotemporal Fusion Network for Ground-Based Remote Sensing Cloud Image Sequence Extrapolation
This work addresses cloud image extrapolation for photovoltaic power systems, representing an incremental improvement with specific gains in accuracy and efficiency.
The paper tackles ground-based remote sensing cloud image sequence extrapolation for photovoltaic power systems by proposing USF-Net, which integrates adaptive large-kernel convolutions and a low-complexity attention mechanism to improve spatiotemporal modeling and efficiency, achieving superior prediction accuracy and computational balance compared to state-of-the-art methods.
Ground-based remote sensing cloud image sequence extrapolation is a key research area in the development of photovoltaic power systems. However, existing approaches exhibit several limitations:(1)they primarily rely on static kernels to augment feature information, lacking adaptive mechanisms to extract features at varying resolutions dynamically;(2)temporal guidance is insufficient, leading to suboptimal modeling of long-range spatiotemporal dependencies; and(3)the quadratic computational cost of attention mechanisms is often overlooked, limiting efficiency in practical deployment. To address these challenges, we propose USF-Net, a Unified Spatiotemporal Fusion Network that integrates adaptive large-kernel convolutions and a low-complexity attention mechanism, combining temporal flow information within an encoder-decoder framework. Specifically, the encoder employs three basic layers to extract features. Followed by the USTM, which comprises:(1)a SiB equipped with a SSM that dynamically captures multi-scale contextual information, and(2)a TiB featuring a TAM that effectively models long-range temporal dependencies while maintaining computational efficiency. In addition, a DSM with a TGM is introduced to enable unified modeling of temporally guided spatiotemporal dependencies. On the decoder side, a DUM is employed to address the common "ghosting effect." It utilizes the initial temporal state as an attention operator to preserve critical motion signatures. As a key contribution, we also introduce and release the ASI-CIS dataset. Extensive experiments on ASI-CIS demonstrate that USF-Net significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods, establishing a superior balance between prediction accuracy and computational efficiency for ground-based cloud extrapolation. The dataset and source code will be available at https://github.com/she1110/ASI-CIS.