Abstract:Currently, meteorological stations mostly use instruments like cameras, theodolites and laser range finders to manually calculate the assessment results of the the observed environment, according to the evaluation indicators, which for the manually measured factors, may lead to nonobjective assessment results. To deal with the problem, this study proposes a method for making a panorama and shading angle diagram for meteorological stations for improving the observation environment based on automatic panoramic image processing. This method acquires the multiple adjoining and overlapping pictures of the surrounding environment by rotary cameras and laser range finders, combines the acquired pictures into a panoramas of the observation environment with the splicing technique of a cylindrical panorama. By fusing these panoramas with a “fade in and out” effect and preprocessing these images with filtering, binarization processing, morphological processing, and edge detection, this method figures out the coordinates of the maximum boundary pixel of the panorama, the actual altitudes of the obstructions around the observation site, their distance to the observation site center and the maximum elevation of the obstructions to the center. It can also make the realtime display of the assessment. The results indicate that the method can help observation stations to improve the efficiency of environment assessment.