A Cloud Detection Approach Based on Hybrid Multispectral Features with Dynamic Thresholds for GF-1 Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Nowadays, GF-1 (GF is the acronym for GaoFen which means high-resolution in Chinese) remote sensing images are widely utilized in agriculture because of their high spatio-temporal resolution and free availability. However, due to the transferrable rationale of optical satellites, the GF-1 remote sensing images are inevitably impacted by clouds, which leads to a lack of ground object’s information of crop areas and adds noises to research datasets. Therefore, it is crucial to efficiently detect the cloud pixel of GF-1 imagery of crop areas with powerful performance both in time consumption and accuracy when it comes to large-scale agricultural processing and application. To solve the above problems, this paper proposed a cloud detection approach based on hybrid multispectral features (HMF) with dynamic thresholds. This approach combined three spectral features, namely the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI), WHITENESS and the Haze-Optimized Transformation (HOT), to detect the cloud pixels, which can take advantage of the hybrid Multispectral Features. Meanwhile, in order to meet the variety of the threshold values in different seasons, a dynamic threshold adjustment method was adopted, which builds a relationship between the features and a solar altitude angle to acquire a group of specific thresholds for an image. With the test of GF-1 remote sensing datasets and comparative trials with Random Forest (RF), the results show that the method proposed in this paper not only has high accuracy, but also has advantages in terms of time consumption. The average accuracy of cloud detection can reach 90.8% and time consumption for each GF-1 imagery can reach to 5 min, which has been reduced by 83.27% compared with RF method. Therefore, the approach presented in this work could serve as a reference for those who are interested in the cloud detection of remote sensing images.