Automatically generated interactive weather reports based on webcam images

摘要

Most weather reports are either based on data from dedicated weatherstations, satellite images, manual measurements or forecasts. In this papera system that automatically generates weather reports using the contentson webcam images are proposed. There are thousands of openly availablewebcams on the Internet that provide images in real time. A webcam imagecan reveal much about the weather conditions at a particular site and thisstudy demonstrates a strategy for automatically classifying a webcam sceneinto cloudy, partially cloudy, sunny, foggy and night. The system has been runfor several months collecting 60 Gb of image data from webcams across theworld. The reports are available through an interactive web-based interface.A selection of benchmark images was manually tagged to assess the accuracyof the weather classification which reached a success rate of 67.3%.