Video WeAther RecoGnition (VARG): An Intensity-Labeled Video Weather Recognition Dataset

Adverse weather (rain, snow, and fog) can negatively impact computer vision tasks by introducing noise in sensor data; therefore, it is essential to recognize weather conditions for building safe and robust autonomous systems in the agricultural and autonomous driving/drone sectors. The performance degradation in computer vision tasks due to adverse weather depends on the type of weather and the intensity, which influences the amount of noise in sensor data. However, existing weather recognition datasets often lack intensity labels, limiting their effectiveness. To address this limitation, we present VARG, a novel video-based weather recognition dataset with weather intensity labels. The dataset comprises a diverse set of short video sequences collected from various social media platforms and videos recorded by the authors, processed into usable clips, and categorized into three major weather categories, rain, fog, and snow, with three intensity classes: absent/no, moderate, and high. The dataset contains 6742 annotated clips from 1079 videos, with the training set containing 5159 clips and the test set containing 1583 clips. Two sets of annotations are provided for training, the first set to train the models as a multi-label weather intensity classifier and the second set to train the models as a multi-class classifier for three weather scenarios. This paper describes the dataset characteristics and presents an evaluation study using several deep learning-based video recognition approaches for weather intensity prediction.