Cloud removal for hyperspectral remotely sensed images based on hyperspectral information fusion

Hyperspectral remote sensing plays an important role in a wide variety of fields. However, its specific application for land surface analysis has been constrained due to the different shapes of thick, opaque cloud cover. The reconstruction of missing information obscured by clouds in remote-sensing images is an area of active research. However, most of the available cloud-removal methods are not suitable for hyperspectral images, because they lose the spectral information which is very important for hyperspectral analysis. In this article, we developed a new spectral resolution enhancement method for cloud removal (SREM-CR) from hyperspectral images, with the help of an auxiliary cloud-free multispectral image acquired at different times. In the fixed hyperspectral image, spectra of the cloud cover pixels are reconstructed depending on the relationship between the original hyperspectral and multispectral images. The final resulting image has the same spectral resolution as the original hyperspectral image but without clouds. This approach was tested on two experiments, in which the results were compared by visual interpretation and statistical indices. Our method demonstrated good performance.