Cloud Detection From Remote Sensing Imagery Based on Domain Translation Network

Cloud detection in optical imagery has drawn remarkable attention in the era of big Earth observation data analytic. While multiple supervised learning models have been developed for such purpose, large volumes of paired training samples annotated at the pixel level are essential to ensure the model's generalization capacity. However, constructing a comprehensive cloud detection training database is a tedious and time-consuming process. To tackle this dilemma, we simply regard cloud-contaminated remote sensing (RS) imagery as the combination of cloud and background domains and propose a cloud detection framework based on image-to-image domain translation network (DTNet) to separate cloud-contaminated RS imagery into two target domains of cloud and background object images without using any paired and pixel-level annotation training data. The framework was evaluated with multispectral images from two types of sensors, Landsat-8 Operational Land Imager (OLI) (30 m) and GaoFen-1 (16 m), and demonstrated superior or comparable performance compared with several state-of-the-art cloud detection models.