Clothing Clues: Using AI to Guess the Temperature

Ever wished you could predict the weather just by looking at what people are wearing? Believe it or not, scientists have made that possible! They've created a smart system using artificial intelligence to figure out air temperature from pictures of people's clothing. This may seem like a fun game, but it's actually super useful for weather forecasting and keeping an eye on the environment. Researchers used a clever method called transfer learning. This means they taught a special type of neural network, called a convolutional neural network (CNN), to recognize patterns in clothing images. They used models like DeepLabV3 Plus, BigTransfer, and others to help the system learn from lots of pictures. The scientists made a special collection of images called the Human Clothing Image Dataset (HCID), with 10, 000 pictures split into two groups: high temperature and low temperature outfits. To see how well their system worked, they tested it using different measures like precision, recall, and accuracy. They also used Grad-CAM to highlight important areas in the images that helped the system make its decisions. In the end, one model called DenseNet121 ended up being the best, with an amazing 98. 13% accuracy! So, next time you see someone wearing a winter coat in the summer, it might not be crazy— it could be a sign of things to come! This amazing discovery could help us understand weather better and plan for the future.