Performance Analysis of Cloud-Net with Cross-sensor Training Dataset for Satellite Image-based Cloud Detection

Since satellite images generally include clouds in the atmosphere, it is essential to detect or mask clouds before satellite image processing. Clouds were detected using physical characteristics of clouds in previous research. Cloud detection methods using deep learning techniques such as CNN or the modified U-Net in image segmentation field have been studied recently. Since image segmentation is the process of assigning a label to every pixel in an image, precise pixel-based dataset is required for cloud detection. Obtaining accurate training datasets is more important than a network configuration in image segmentation for cloud detection. Existing deep learning techniques used different training datasets. And test datasets were extracted from intra-dataset which were acquired by same sensor and procedure as training dataset. Different datasets make it difficult to determine which network shows a better overall performance. To verify the effectiveness of the cloud detection network such as Cloud-Net, two types of networks were trained using the cloud dataset from KOMPSAT-3 images provided by the AIHUB site and the L8-Cloud dataset from Landsat8 images which was publicly opened by a Cloud-Net author. Test data from intra-dataset of KOMPSAT-3 cloud dataset were used for validating the network. The simulation results show that the network trained with KOMPSAT-3 cloud dataset shows good performance on the network trained with L8-Cloud dataset. Because Landsat8 and KOMPSAT-3 satellite images have different GSDs, making it difficult to achieve good results from cross-sensor validation. The network could be superior for intra-dataset, but it could be inferior for cross-sensor data. It is necessary to study techniques that show good results in cross-senor validation dataset in the future.