An effective thin cloud removal procedure for visible remote sensing images

Clouds are obstructions for land-surface observation, which result in the regional information being blurred or even lost. Thin clouds are transparent, and images of regions covered by thin clouds contain information about both the atmosphere and the ground. Therefore, thin cloud removal is a challenging task as the ground information is easily affected when the thin cloud removal is performed. An efficient and effective thin cloud removal method is proposed for visible remote sensing images in this paper, with the aim being to remove the thin clouds and also restore the ground information. Since thin cloud is considered as low-frequency information, the proposed method is based on the classic homomorphic filter and is executed in the frequency domain. The optimal cut-off frequency for each channel is determined semi-automatically. In order to preserve the clear pixels and ensure the high fidelity of the result, cloudy pixels are detected and handled separately. As a particular kind of low-frequency information, cloud-free water surfaces are specially treated and corrected. Since only cloudy pixels are involved in the calculation, the method is highly efficient and is suited for large remote sensing scenes. Scenes including different land-cover types were selected to validate the proposed method, and a comparison analysis with other methods was also performed. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method is effective in correcting thin cloud contaminated images while preserving the true spectral information.