Automatic Cloud Detection for Chinese High Resolution Remote Sensing Satellite Imagery

Abstract

Cloud detection is always an arduous problem in satellite imagery processing, especially the thin cloud which has the similar spectral characteristics as ground surfacehas long been the obstacle of the production of imagery product. In this paper, an automatic cloud detection method for Chinese high resolution remote sensing satellite imagery is introduced to overcome this problem.Firstly, the image is transformed from RGB to HIS color space by an improved color transformation model. The basic cloud coverage figure is obtained by using the information of intensity and saturation,followed by getting the modified figure with the information of near-infrared band and hue. Methods of histogram equalization and bilateral filtering, combined with conditioned Otsu thresholding are adopted to generate texture information. Then the cloud seed figureis obtained by using texture information to eliminate the existed errors in the modified figure. Finally, cloud covered areas are accurately extracted by integration of intensity information from the HIS color space and cloud seed figure. Compared to the detection results of other automatic and interactive methods, the overall accuracy of our proposed method achieves nearly 10% improvement, and it is capable of improving the efficiency of cloud detection significantly.