A scattering law based cirrus correction method for Landsat 8 OLI visible and near-infrared images

Abstract

Cirrus clouds are commonly distributed in the atmosphere, and can lead to degradation of the ground information in optical remotely sensed images obtained using airborne and spaceborne sensors. A cirrus band on the Landsat 8 Operational Land Imager (OLI), i.e., Band 9, is designed to precisely detect cirrus cloud, providing a reference basis for the radiance calculation of cirrus cloud in other bands. Therefore, based on a scattering law, a cirrus cloud correction method is proposed in this paper to restore the ground information for Landsat 8 OLI visible and near-infrared (VNIR) images by comprehensively using the visible and cirrus bands. The scattering law and the high correlation between the two adjoining blue bands are combined to estimate each VNIR band's cirrus radiance. The relationship among the bands is constrained to comply with the scattering law. The differences between the ocean and land surfaces are also considered when determining the parameter in the scattering law. In the experiments conducted in this study, both simulated and acquired images contaminated with cirrus cloud were used to evaluate the proposed method, and both visual and quantitative evaluations were carried out to verify the performance. The results suggest that the cirrus cloud in the VNIR bands can be removed by the use of the proposed method. The ground information can also be adequately restored, with a mean absolute error of less than 0.7757 for the simulated data and a structural similarity index measure of greater than 0.8621 for the acquired data. When compared with three existing correction methods, the proposed method was able to obtain clearer and more accurate results over various land and ocean scenes. Furthermore, this method's applicability to other sensors with similar bands, such as the Sentinel-2 Multispectral Instrument, was also investigated and validated.