RICE: A Dataset and Baseline for Cloud Removal in Remote Sensing Images

Abstract

Removing clouds is an essential preprocessing step in analyzing remote sensing images, as cloud-based overlays commonly occur in optical remote sensing images and can significantly limit the usability of the acquired data. Deep learning has exhibited remarkable progress in remote sensing, encompassing scene classification and change detection tasks. Nevertheless, the appli-cation of deep learning techniques to cloud removal in remote sensing images is currently con-strained by the limited availability of training datasets explicitly tailored for neural networks. This paper presents the Remote sensing Image Cloud rEmoving dataset (RICE) to address this challenge and proposes baseline models incorporating a convolutional attention mechanism, which has demonstrated superior performance in identifying and restoring cloud-affected regions, with quantitative results indicating a 3.08% improvement in accuracy over traditional methods. This mechanism empowers the network to comprehend better the spatial structure, local details, and inter-channel correlations within remote sensing images, thus effectively addressing the diverse distributions of clouds. Moreover, by integrating this attention mechanism, our models achieve a crucial comparison advantage, outperforming existing state-of-the-art techniques in terms of both visual quality and quantitative metrics. We propose adopting the Learned Per-ceptual Image Patch Similarity metric, which emphasizes perceptual similarity, to evaluate the quality of cloud-free images generated by the models. Our work not only contributes to advancing cloud removal techniques in remote sensing but also provides a comprehensive evaluation framework for assessing the fidelity of the generated images.