Mining of moving objects from time-series images and its application to satellite weather imagery

The framework of mining of moving objects from image data sequence is presented. Scenes are first clustered and labeled by using two-stage SOM that is modified to recognize images including similar moving objects as the same cluster, and that well recognizes scenes including prominent objects. After extraction of images which include prominent objects based on clustering result, the position and the shape of objects are approximated by using mixture gaussian model via EM algorithm, providing the adequate or larger number of components. By adopting the average of the data points in the smaller blocks as the initial parameters, the solutions are stabilized and the identification of components among time-series images and the tracking of a specific object become easier. This framework is applied to a four-year (ranging from 1997 to 2000) dataset of cloud images taken by Japanese weather satellite GMS-5 to evaluate its performance. Modified SOM method well classifies scenes which include prominent moving object, and seasonal variation tendency is detected in the cluster ID sequence. The result of object detection via EM algorithm for summer-type images including clear cloud masses such as typhoons shows that this approach well approximate the adequate distribution of cloud masses in many cases. Objects in the very irregular shapes are also well represented as the mixtures of gaussians. The extracted object information, together with the scene clustering result, is expected to offer us a rich source for knowledge discovery of video datasets. This approach is one of the effective ways of mining video images whose characteristics are unknown in advance, and thus applicable to the various type of applications.