SOPNet Method for the Fine-Grained Measurement and Prediction of Precipitation Intensity Using Outdoor Surveillance Cameras

Surveillance cameras have been widely used in urban environments and are increasingly used in rural ones. Such cameras have mostly been used for security, but they can be applied to the problem of furnishing fine-grained measurements and predictions of precipitation intensity. In this study, we formulated a stacked order-preserving (OP) learning framework to train a network using time-series data. We constructed an OP module, which uses a three-dimensional (3D) convolution operation to extract features with spatial and temporal information and that are associated with ConvLSTM; this feature extraction is used to learn the short-term and OP time-series relationships between features. Furthermore, the OP modules are stacked to form a stacked OP network (SOPNet), which strengthens the relationship between features in long-term time-series image sequences. This SOPNet can be use to obtain fine-grained measurements and predictions of precipitation intensity from images captured by outdoor surveillance cameras. Our main contributions are threefold. First, the SOPNet strengthens the short-term and long-term time-series relationship between features. Second, the SOPNet simultaneously examines spatial and temporal information to measure and predict precipitation intensity. Third, we constructed a precipitation intensity database based on optical images captured by outdoor surveillance cameras. We experimentally evaluated our proposed architecture using our self-collected data set. We found that SOPNet yields better performance and greater accuracy relative to its well-known state-of-the-art counterparts with respect to various metrics.