Thin clouds detection and the difficulty in distinguishing between clouds and bright surface features have consistently presented challenges in optical remote sensing cloud detection tasks. Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have made significant progress, however, CNNs perform weakly in capturing global information interactions due to the inherent limitation of network structure. To address these issues, we propose a hybrid CNN-Transformer network with differential feature enhancement (DFE) for cloud detection (CNN-TransNet). CNN-TransNet adopts a dual-branch encoder consisting of CNN-Transformer module and DFE module. CNN-TransNet combines the strengths of both Transformer and CNN to enhance finer details and build long-range dependencies. CNN is considered as a high-resolution feature extractor for capturing low-level features. The transformer module encodes image sequences by patch embedding to extract high-level features and relationships. DFE branch utilizes differential features and attention mechanism to further obtain effective information for distinguishing between clouds and non-clouds. The decoder upsamples features of the encoder and concatenates multiscale features from the CNN layers. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method achieves excellent performance on Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 images, with a high cloud pixel precision of 92.94% and 93.04%. Moreover, it effectively reduces thin cloud omissions and the misclassifications of bright surface features.

Automatic cloud detection in remote sensing images is of great significance. Deep-learning-based methods can achieve cloud detection with high accuracy; however, network training heavily relies on a large number of labels. Manually labelling pixel-wise level cloud and non-cloud annotations for many remote sensing images is laborious and requires expert-level knowledge. Different types of satellite images cannot share a set of training data, due to the difference in spectral range and spatial resolution between them. Hence, labelled samples in each upcoming satellite image are required to train a new deep-learning-based model. In order to overcome such a limitation, a novel cloud detection algorithm based on a spectral library and convolutional neural network (CD-SLCNN) was proposed in this paper. In this method, the residual learning and one-dimensional CNN (Res-1D-CNN) was used to accurately capture the spectral information of the pixels based on the prior spectral library, effectively preventing errors due to the uncertainties in thin clouds, broken clouds, and clear-sky pixels during remote sensing interpretation. Benefiting from data simulation, the method is suitable for the cloud detection of different types of multispectral data. A total of 62 Landsat-8 Operational Land Imagers (OLI), 25 Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometers (MODIS), and 20 Sentinel-2 satellite images acquired at different times and over different types of underlying surfaces, such as a high vegetation coverage, urban area, bare soil, water, and mountains, were used for cloud detection validation and quantitative analysis, and the cloud detection results were compared with the results from the function of the mask, MODIS cloud mask, support vector machine, and random forest. The comparison revealed that the CD-SLCNN method achieved the best performance, with a higher overall accuracy (95.6%, 95.36%, 94.27%) and mean intersection over union (77.82%, 77.94%, 77.23%) on the Landsat-8 OLI, MODIS, and Sentinel-2 data, respectively. The CD-SLCNN algorithm produced consistent results with a more accurate cloud contour on thick, thin, and broken clouds over a diverse underlying surface, and had a stable performance regarding bright surfaces, such as buildings, ice, and snow.

Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectrometer (MODIS) images are widely used in land, ocean, and atmospheric monitoring, due to their wide spectral coverage, high temporal resolution, and convenient data acquisition. Accurate cloud detection is critical to the fine processing and application of MODIS images. Owing to spatial resolution limitations and the influence of mixed pixels, most MODIS cloud detection algorithms struggle to effectively recognize of clouds and ground objects. Here, we propose a novel cloud detection method based on land surface reflectance (LSR) and a multiscale feature convolutional neural network to achieve high-precision cloud detection, particularly for thin clouds and clouds over bright surface. A monthly surface reflectance dataset was constructed by MODIS products (MOD09A1) and employed to provide background information for cloud detection. Difference-based samples were obtained using surface reflectance as well MODIS images of different phases based on difference operations. The multiscale feature network (MFCD-Net) using an atrous spatial pyramid pooling (ASPP) and a channel and spatial attention module (CSAM) integrated low-level spatial features and high-level semantic information to capture multiscale features and generate a high-precision cloud mask. For cloud detection experiments and quantitative analysis, 61 MODIS images acquired at different times on various underlying surface types were used. Cloud detection results were compared to those of UNet, Deeplabv3+, UNet++, PSPNet, and top of atmosphere-based (MFCD-TOA) methods. The proposed method performed well, with the highest overall accuracy (96.55%), precision (92.13%), and recall (88.90%). It improved cloud detection accuracy in various scenarios, reducing thin cloud omission and bright surface misidentification.