Research on Transfer Learning Methods for Classification of Typhoon Cloud Image

Aiming at the complexity of traditional methods for feature extraction about satellite cloud images, and the difficulty of developing deep convolutional neural network from scratch, a parameter-based transfer learning method for classifying typhoon intensity is proposed. Take typhoon satellite cloud images published by Japan Meteorological Agency, which includes 10 000 scenes among nearly 40 years to construct training and test typhoon datasets. Three deep convolutional neural networks, VGG16, InceptionV3 and ResNet50 are trained as source models on the large-scale ImageNet datasets. Considering the discrepancy between low-level features and high-level semantic features of typhoon cloud images, adapt the optimal number of transferable layers in neural networks and freeze weights of low-level network. Meanwhile, fine-tune surplus weights on typhoon dataset adaptively. Finally, a transferred prediction model which is suitable for small sample typhoon datasets, called T-typCNNs is proposed. Experimental results show that the T-typCNNs can achieve training accuracy of 95.081% and testing accuracy of 91.134%, 18.571% higher than using shallow convolutional neural network, 9.819% higher than training with source models from scratch.