Phy-CoCo: Physical Constraint-Based Correlation Learning for Tropical Cyclone Intensity and Size Estimation

Hanting Yan, Pan Mu, Cheng Huang, Jinglin Zhang, Cong Bai

Abstract: Tropical Cyclone (TC) estimation aims to estimate various attributes of TC in real-time to alleviate and prevent disasters caused by violent TCs. As artificial intelligence technology advances, various deep learning-based multi-task estimation approaches have been proposed. However, most of them only focus on extracting common features of tasks, disregarding potential negative transfer and task interactions between different tasks. This paper is thus motivated to propose a Physical Constraint-based Correlation (Phy-CoCo) learning framework from the perspective of Multi-Task Learning (MTL). Specifically, for task-specific feature learning, we introduce Correlation Modeling (CoM) based on Centrally Expanded Pooling (CEP). Furthermore, for cross-task interaction, we propose a Multi-Domain Recurrent Convolution (MDRC) module to incorporate physical constraints into MTL. These physical constraints enable the transformation of different task features by simulating the physical relations among different attributes of TC. Lastly, in combination with a task-shared network that leverages the hybrid fusion of multi-modal data, our MTL framework accurately estimates various TC attributes. Extensive experiments conducted on our constructed dataset demonstrate that the proposed Phy-CoCo outperforms previous methods in TC estimation in terms of estimation error, verifying the potential of the physics-incorporated MTL model.