Pixel-Wise Sky-Obstacle Segmentation in Fisheye Imagery Using Deep Learning and Gradient Boosting

Accurate sky-obstacle segmentation in hemispherical fisheye imagery is essential for solar irradiance forecasting, photovoltaic system design, and environmental monitoring. However, existing methods often rely on expensive all-sky imagers and region-specific training data, produce coarse sky-obstacle boundaries, and ignore the optical properties of fisheye lenses. We propose a low-cost segmentation framework designed for fisheye imagery that combines synthetic data generation, lens-aware augmentation, and a hybrid deep-learning pipeline. Synthetic fisheye training images are created from publicly available street-view panoramas to cover diverse environments without dedicated hardware, and lens-aware augmentations model fisheye projection and photometric effects to improve robustness across devices. On this dataset, we train a convolutional neural network (CNN) and refine its output with gradient-boosted decision trees (GBDT) to sharpen sky-obstacle boundaries. The method is evaluated on real fisheye images captured with smartphones and low-cost clip-on lenses across multiple sites, achieving an Intersection over Union (IoU) of 96.63% and an F1 score of 98.29%, along with high boundary accuracy. An additional evaluation on an external panoramic baseline dataset confirms strong cross-dataset generalization. Together, these results show that the proposed framework enables accurate, low-cost, and widely deployable hemispherical sky segmentation for practical solar and environmental imaging applications.