Texture operator for snow particle classification into snowflake and graupel

In order to improve the estimation of precipitation, the coefficients of Z–R relation should be determined for each snow type. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the type of falling snow. Consequently, this research addresses a problem of snow particle classification into snowflake and graupel in an automatic manner (as these types are the most common in the study region). Having correctly classified precipitation events, it is believed that it will be possible to estimate the related parameters accurately. The automatic classification system presented here describes the images with texture operators. Some of them are well‐known from the literature: first order features, co-occurrence matrix, grey-tone difference matrix, run length matrix, and local binary pattern, but also a novel approach to design simple local statistic operators is introduced. In this work the following texture operators are defined: mean histogram, min–max histogram, and mean–variance histogram. Moreover, building a feature vector, which is based on the structure created in many from mentioned algorithms is also suggested. For classification, the k-nearest neighbourhood classifier was applied. The results showed that it is possible to achieve correct classification accuracy above 80% by most of the techniques. The best result of 86.06%, was achieved for operator built from a structure achieved in the middle stage of the co-occurrence matrix calculation. Next, it was noticed that describing an image with two texture operators does not improve the classification results considerably. In the best case the correct classification efficiency was 87.89% for a pair of texture operators created from local binary pattern and structure build in a middle stage of grey-tone difference matrix calculation. This also suggests that the information gathered by each texture operator is redundant. Therefore, the principal component analysis was applied in order to remove the unnecessary information and additionally reduce the length of the feature vectors. The improvement of the correct classification efficiency for up to 100% is possible for methods: min–max histogram, texture operator built from structure achieved in a middle stage of co-occurrence matrix calculation, texture operator built from a structure achieved in a middle stage of grey-tone difference matrix creation, and texture operator based on a histogram, when the feature vector stores 99% of initial information. ► In this study we desig