Cloud Detection From High-Resolution Remote Sensing Images Based on Convolutional Neural Networks With Geographic Features and Contextual Information

Abstract

The diversity and complexity of the subsurface, as well as the similarity of cloud features to those of highlighted surface objects (especially snowy areas), are the main reasons for the current limitations in cloud detection accuracy. This letter proposes a semantic segmentation network fusing geographic features with contextual information for cloud detection named GCI_CD. We design three modules: geographical-cloud information fusion module (to distinguish between clouds and snow), separable ResNet with CSAM encoder (to enhance channel and spatial association information extraction), contextual information integration module (to extract multi-scale features). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that geographic information has been fused in a cloud detection method. The validity of our proposed method is demonstrated using a high-resolution GF-1 dataset containing the near-infrared band and dividing the snow-covered and non-snow-covered areas. The experimental results show that GCI_CD has a better performance not only in snow-covered regions but also in the non-snow-covered regions. Especially for snow-covered images, the IOU of GCI_CD’s cloud detection results are improved by 5% on average compared to other cloud detection methods.