Removing thick clouds in landsat 8 OLI images with cloudy time-series auxiliary data

Abstract Thick cloud occlusion severely limits the subsequent application of optical remote-sensing images. Existing mainstream cloud removal methods often use cloud-free homologous temporal images to provide auxiliary information. However, due to the limitation of cloud occlusion and satellite revisit cycle, the time interval between the cloud-free auxiliary image and the target cloudy image is often too large, and the possible land cover changes during the period increase the uncertainty of effective information on the auxiliary images. In this case, more accurate reconstructions may be obtained by using temporally closer and partially cloud-contaminated images. In this paper, a deep network, convLSTM, is developed for cloud removal (i.e., CR-convLSTM), which makes full use of the complementary effective information on partially cloud-contaminated time-series images. Experiments based on simulated clouds indicated that CR-convLSTM can obtain more accurate predictions than the classical cloud removal method MNSPI. CR-convLSTM is an effective cloud removal method with high computational efficiency while ensuring predicting accuracy.