Cloud movement detection for satellite images

Abstract

The ever-increasing amount of information available to meteorologists has led to a better understanding of weather forecasting. The ability to automatically detect and estimate cloud segment speed and direction in a weather satellite would be very useful in forecasts of future weather events. The objective of this research is to extract a particular cloud segment from a sequence of infrared satellite images, and detect cloud movement and calculate its speed and direction. The difference centroid algorithm is employed to detect the movement of the cloud segment. Cloud speed and direction are then calculated by finding centroid displacement between cloud segments.