FORECAST-CLSTM: A New Convolutional LSTM Network for Cloudage Nowcasting

With the highly demand of large-scale and real-time weather service for public, a refinement of short-time cloudage prediction has become an essential part of the weather forecast productions. To provide a weather-service-compliant cloudage nowcasting, in this paper, we propose a novel hierarchical Convolutional Long-Short-Term Memory network based deep learning model, which we term as FORECAST-CLSTM, with a new Forecaster loss function to predict the future satellite cloud images. The model is designed to fuse multi-scale features in the hierarchical network structure to predict the pixel value and the morphological movement of the cloudage simultaneously. We also collect about 40K infrared satellite nephograms and create a large-scale Satellite Cloudage Map Dataset(SCMD). The proposed FORECAST-CLSTM model is shown to achieve better prediction performance compared with the state-of-the-art ConvLSTM model and the proposed Forecaster Loss Function is also demonstrated to retain the uncertainty of the real atmosphere condition better than conventional loss function.

Local Contrast Learning

Learning a deep model from small data is yet an opening and challenging problem. We focus on one-shot classification by deep learning approach based on a small quantity of training samples. We proposed a novel deep learning approach named Local Contrast Learning (LCL) based on the key insight about a human cognitive behavior that human recognizes the objects in a specific context by contrasting the objects in the context or in her/his memory. LCL is used to train a deep model that can contrast the recognizing sample with a couple of contrastive samples randomly drawn and shuffled. On one-shot classification task on Omniglot, the deep model based LCL with 122 layers and 1.94 millions of parameters, which was trained on a tiny dataset with only 60 classes and 20 samples per class, achieved the accuracy 97.99% that outperforms human and state-of-the-art established by Bayesian Program Learning (BPL) trained on 964 classes. LCL is a fundamental idea which can be applied to alleviate parametric model's overfitting resulted by lack of training samples.