Classification of Ground-Based Cloud Images by Improved Combined Convolutional Network

Changes in clouds can affect the outpower of photovoltaics (PVs). Ground-based cloud images classification is an important prerequisite for PV power prediction. Due to the intra-class difference and inter-class similarity of cloud images, the classical convolutional network is obviously insufficient in distinguishing ability. In this paper, a classification method of ground-based cloud images by improved combined convolutional network is proposed. To solve the problem of sub-network overfitting caused by redundancy of pixel information, overlap pooling kernel is used to enhance the elimination effect of information redundancy in the pooling layer. A new channel attention module, ECA-WS (Efficient Channel Attention-Weight Sharing), is introduced to improve the network's ability to express channel information. The decision fusion algorithm is employed to fuse the outputs of sub-networks with multi-scales. According to the number of cloud images in each category, different weights are applied to the fusion results, which solves the problem of network scale limitation and dataset imbalance. Experiments are carried out on the open MGCD dataset and the self-built NRELCD dataset. The results show that the proposed model has significantly improved the classification accuracy compared with the classical network and the latest algorithms.