Semantic segmentation of clouds in satellite images based on U-Net++ architecture and attention mechanism

•Proposed U-Net++ based network with attention mechanism for cloud segmentation.•Proposed SEUNet++ achieves an IoU score of 91.8 %.•Transfer learning helps to improve the segmentation results.•SEUNet++ performs better than the original U-Net++ architecture.•SEUNet++ improves the state-of-the-art by lifting the IoU score by 0.23 %.