Cloud cover, height and type are three basic elements of
cloud observation. Nevertheless, at present, ground-based
clouds are observed by persons who have received professional
training. This method takes huge manual cost and depends
heavily on the experience of the observers. Therefore,
automatic ground-based cloud observation technique is eagerly
required in this area. Until now, a lot of automatic cloud
observation techniques have been proposed. For example,
cloud cover can be detected by a number of ground-based sky
imager, such as TSI [1], WSI [2], ICI [3], ICA [4], and
WSIRCMS [5]. Cloud base height (CBH) can be effectively
measured by laser measuring cloud device. However,
automatic cloud classification algorithms are still under