Global-Similarity Local-Salience Network for Traffic Weather Recognition

Recognizing the current weather conditions from a single image is of great theoretical significance. It also has potential practical value for daily life and traffic scheduling. To achieve that, typical weather recognition methods focus on learning a general weather description, e.g., sunny, cloudy, foggy, rainy and snowy etc, for the overall weather condition. However, it is far away from being sufficient for many tasks especially traffic management and control. To solve this key problem, this paper proposes a Global-Similarity Local-Salience Network (abbreviated as GSLSNet) for traffic weather recognition. Specifically, a simple but effective Global-Similarity Module (GSM) is proposed to recognize the overall weather condition and a Local-Salience Module (LSM) is presented to restrict the network to focus on road weather details. Besides, this paper also provides a new traffic weather dataset, named TWData, which is the first fine categorized dataset especially for highway weather recognition. Experimental results compared with state-of-the-art methods on both public datasets and TWData demonstrate the superiority of the proposed GSLSNet.