Cloud-Net+: A Cloud Segmentation CNN for Landsat 8 Remote Sensing Imagery Optimized with Filtered Jaccard Loss Function

Cloud Segmentation is one of the fundamental steps in optical remote sensing image analysis. Current methods for identification of cloud regions in aerial or satellite images are not accurate enough especially in the presence of snow and haze. This paper presents a deep learning-based framework to address the problem of cloud detection in Landsat 8 imagery. The proposed method benefits from a convolutional neural network (Cloud-Net+) with multiple blocks, which is trained with a novel loss function (Filtered Jaccard loss). The proposed loss function is more sensitive to the absence of cloud pixels in an image and penalizes/rewards the predicted mask more accurately. The combination of Cloud-Net+ and Filtered Jaccard loss function delivers superior results over four public cloud detection datasets. Our experiments on one of the most common public datasets in computer vision (Pascal VOC dataset) show that the proposed network/loss function could be used in other segmentation tasks for more accurate performance/evaluation.