Artificial Intelligence-Based Detection of Light Points: An Aid for Night-Time Visibility Observations

Visibility is one of the key meteorological parameters with special importance in aviation meteorology and the transportation industry. Nevertheless, it is not a straightforward task to automatize visibility observations, since the assistance of trained human observers is still inevitable. The current paper attempts to make the first step in the process of automated visibility observations: it examines, by the approaches of artificial intelligence (AI), whether light points in the target area can or cannot be automatically detected for the purposes of night-time visibility observations. From a technical point of view, our approach mimics human visibility observation of the whole circular horizon by the usage of camera imagery. We evaluated the detectability of light points in the camera images (1) based on an AI approach (convolutional neural network, CNN) and (2) based on a traditional approach using simple binary thresholding (BT). The models based on trained CNN achieved remarkably better results in terms of higher values of statistical metrics, and less susceptibility to errors than the BT-based method. Compared to BT, the CNN classification method indicated greater stability since the accuracy of these models grew with increasing pixel size around the key points. This fundamental difference between the approaches was also confirmed through the Mann-Whitney U test. Thus, the presented AI-based determination of key points' detectability in the night with decent accuracy has great potential in the objectivization of everyday routines of professional meteorology.