Image processing for weather satellite cloud segmentation

Image segmentation of weather satellite imagery is an important first step in an automated weather forecasting system. Accurate cloud extraction is also important in the determination of solar radiative transfer in atmospheric research, where satellite observations are used as inputs to global climate models to predict climatic change. Most of the current cloud extraction algorithms tend to be quite complicated to implement and execution time is potentially slow. The authors present a new algorithm which is simple to implement, fast in execution and provides good results in initial tests