  Ground-based whole sky cameras have opened up new opportunities for
monitoring the earth's atmosphere. These cameras are an important complement to
satellite images by providing geoscientists with cheaper, faster, and more
localized data. The images captured by whole sky imagers can have high spatial
and temporal resolution, which is an important pre-requisite for applications
such as solar energy modeling, cloud attenuation analysis, local weather
prediction, etc.
  Extracting valuable information from the huge amount of image data by
detecting and analyzing the various entities in these images is challenging.
However, powerful machine learning techniques have become available to aid with
the image analysis. This article provides a detailed walk-through of recent
developments in these techniques and their applications in ground-based
imaging. We aim to bridge the gap between computer vision and remote sensing
with the help of illustrative examples. We demonstrate the advantages of using
machine learning techniques in ground-based image analysis via three primary
applications -- segmentation, classification, and denoising.
