A Cloud Detection Method for MODIS Images Based on the Dataset from Radiative Transfer Simulations

Accurate cloud detection is an important preprocessing step for subsequent remote sensing data processing. Traditional threshold cloud detection methods have a complex process and require a large number of threshold tests. In recent years, deep learning has been widely applied to cloud detection. However, annotating training datasets for deep learning models typically requires substantial human effort and time investment. Consequently, there are few existing manually annotated cloud detection datasets, and MODIS cloud detection datasets are particularly scarce. To overcome this limitation, we proposed a cloud detection method that combines radiative transfer simulations with deep learning. We first produced a simulated cloud detection dataset using a radiative transfer model and some existing remote sensing products, and then proposed a neural network for training the cloud detection model. Compared with other deep learning models for cloud detection, our method has achieved satisfactory results on the simulated dataset overall. Furthermore, we conducted cloud detection experiments on real satellite imagery. For comparative analysis, we trained other deep learning models on a real satellite image dataset and compared their performance with that of models trained on our simulated dataset. The cloud detection results on real satellite images demonstrate that the models trained on the simulated dataset we proposed achieve performance comparable to those trained on real remote sensing datasets. Specifically, for MODIS data, we compared our results with the official MODIS cloud mask product, MOD35. The results indicate that our method achieves lower false detection rates on mixed surfaces of snow and bare land.