Multimodal GAN for Energy Efficiency and Cloud Classification in Internet of Things

Efficient processing of large-scale multimodal sensor data is a key issue for applying the Internet of Things (IoT). Accurate cloud classification is critical for weather and climate monitoring, which are parts of IoT applications. In this paper, we propose a novel generative deep model named multimodal generative adversarial network (Multimodal GAN) to improve both the energy efficiency and the cloud classification accuracy in IoT. The proposed Multimodal GAN is composed of a discriminator and a generator, each of which is devised to a two-stream network. The branches of two-stream structure correspond to the cloud visual information and the cloud scalar information, respectively. Therefore, the Multimodal GAN is capable of generating the cloud visual information and cloud scalar information simultaneously. Afterward, the training set is extended by the generated multimodal cloud samples, and the deep multimodal cloud classification model is trained by the extended training set. As a result, the classification model possesses high generalization ability and is less prone to be over-fitting. Moreover, the feature representations extracted from the classification model reflect the salient information of raw multimodal cloud data, and therefore they can be stored and transmitted in IoT. The effectiveness of the proposed method in energy efficiency and cloud classification is validated on the multimodal cloud dataset.