MPCM-Net: Multi-scale network integrates partial attention convolution with Mamba for ground-based cloud image segmentation

TL;DR

MPCM-Net is a novel multi-scale network that combines partial attention convolutions with Mamba architecture to improve ground-based cloud image segmentation accuracy and efficiency, supported by a new fine-grained dataset.

Contribution

The paper introduces MPCM-Net, integrating partial attention convolutions with Mamba for better segmentation and efficiency, and releases the CSRC dataset for cloud segmentation benchmarking.

Findings

MPCM-Net outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy and speed.

The CSRC dataset provides a fine-grained benchmark for cloud segmentation.

The approach achieves a good balance between accuracy and inference speed.

Abstract

Ground-based cloud image segmentation is a critical research domain for photovoltaic power forecasting. Current deep learning approaches primarily focus on encoder-decoder architectural refinements. However, existing methodologies exhibit several limitations:(1)they rely on dilated convolutions for multi-scale context extraction, lacking the partial feature effectiveness and interoperability of inter-channel;(2)attention-based feature enhancement implementations neglect accuracy-throughput balance; and (3)the decoder modifications fail to establish global interdependencies among hierarchical local features, limiting inference efficiency. To address these challenges, we propose MPCM-Net, a Multi-scale network that integrates Partial attention Convolutions with Mamba architectures to enhance segmentation accuracy and computational efficiency. Specifically, the encoder incorporates MPAC, which comprises:(1)a MPC block with ParCM and ParSM that enables global spatial interaction across multi-scale cloud formations, and (2)a MPA block combining ParAM and ParSM to extract discriminative features with reduced computational complexity. On the decoder side, a M2B is employed to mitigate contextual loss through a SSHD that maintains linear complexity while enabling deep feature aggregation across spatial and scale dimensions. As a key contribution to the community, we also introduce and release a dataset CSRC, which is a clear-label, fine-grained segmentation benchmark designed to overcome the critical limitations of existing public datasets. Extensive experiments on CSRC demonstrate the superior performance of MPCM-Net over state-of-the-art methods, achieving an optimal balance between segmentation accuracy and inference speed. The dataset and source code will be available at https://github.com/she1110/CSRC.