CLOUD DETECTION METHOD BASED ON FEATURE EXTRACTION IN REMOTE SENSING IMAGES

Abstract. In remote sensing images, the existence of the clouds has a great impact on the image quality and subsequent image processing, as the images covered with clouds contain little useful information. Therefore, the detection and recognition of clouds is one of the major problems in the application of remote sensing images. Present there are two categories of method to cloud detection. One is setting spectrum thresholds based on the characteristics of the clouds to distinguish them. However, the instability and uncertainty of the practical clouds makes this kind of method complexity and weak adaptability. The other method adopts the features in the images to identify the clouds. Since there will be significant overlaps in some features of the clouds and grounds, the detection result is highly dependent on the effectiveness of the features. This paper presented a cloud detection method based on feature extraction for remote sensing images. At first, find out effective features through training pattern, the features are selected from gray, frequency and texture domains. The different features in the three domains of the training samples are calculated. Through the result of statistical analysis of all the features, the useful features are picked up to form a feature set. In concrete, the set includes three feature vectors, respectively, the gray feature vector constituted of average gray, variance, first-order difference, entropy and histogram, the frequency feature vector constituted of DCT high frequency coefficient and wavelet high frequency coefficient, and the texture feature vector constituted of the hybrid entropy and difference of the gray-gradient co-occurrence matrix and the image fractal dimension. Secondly, a thumbnail will be obtained by down sampling the original image and its features of gray, frequency and texture are computed. Last but not least, the cloud region will be judged by the comparison between the actual feature values and the thresholds determined by the sample training process. Experimental results show that the clouds and ground objects can be separated efficiently, and our method can implement rapid clouds detection and cloudiness calculation.