Cloud-Net: An end-to-end Cloud Detection Algorithm for Landsat 8 Imagery

Cloud detection in satellite images is an important first-step in many remote sensing applications. This problem is more challenging when only a limited number of spectral bands are available. To address this problem, a deep learning-based algorithm is proposed in this paper. This algorithm consists of a Fully Convolutional Network (FCN) that is trained by multiple patches of Landsat 8 images. This network, which is called Cloud-Net, is capable of capturing global and local cloud features in an image using its convolutional blocks. Since the proposed method is an end-to-end solution, no complicated pre-processing step is required. Our experimental results prove that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art method over a benchmark dataset by 8.7\% in Jaccard Index.