Intensity prediction of tropical cyclone using multilayer multi-block local binary pattern and tree-based classifiers over North Indian Ocean

Abstract

Local binary pattern (LBP) is an extensively used method in image analysis and pattern recognition related works across various domains. In this paper, we explore cyclone cloud evolution patterns using a modified LBP. The multilayer multi-block local binary pattern (MMLBP) is an extended version of Completed LBP (CLBP) with multiple blocks and many layers. A tropical cyclone (TC) image is converted into 3 × 3 identical blocks to generate central pixels using CLBP magnitude descriptor block-wise (CLBP_MB). These central pixels are used to find the next layer, which is further divided into 3 × 3 blocks to generate central pixels by CLBP_MB descriptor. This technique will iterate until the dimension of the final layer reached to 1 × 1. These central pixels are extracted from each layer and gather in a vector called a feature vector. The proposed method is applied to 600 tropical cyclone (TC) images and each image generates one feature vector. Hence, 600 vectors are passed through tree-based classifiers to classify cyclone images of various classes. The proposed method of feature extraction and classification reaches a maximum of 84.66% accuracy using Random Forest (RF) classifier. The root mean squared error (RMSE) of the MMLBP method is 9.27 kt, which is better than the LBP and MBLBP approaches. Finally, the size of the original feature vector is reduced to 97.4% using correlation based feature subset selection method.