In a digital photo, detecting if a mountain is obscured by clouds.
- by Gavin Brock
The problem
I have a collection of digital photos of a mountain in Japan. However the mountain is often obscured by clouds or fog.
What techniques can I use to detect that the mountain is visible in the image? I am currently using Perl with the Imager module, but open to alternatives.
All the images are taken from the exact same position - these are some samples.
My naïve solution
I started by taking several horizontal pixel samples of the mountain cone and comparing the brightness values to other samples from the sky. This worked well for differentiating good image 1 and bad image 2.
However in the autumn it snowed and the mountain became brighter than the sky, like image 3, and my simple brightness test started to fail.
Image 4 is an example of an edge case. I would classify this as a good image since some of the mountain is clearly visible.