A Multi-Temporal Convolutional Autoencoder Neural Network for Cloud Removal in Remote Sensing Images

The uncontrollable weather conditions can cause a serious problem to remote sensing imaginary. One of the weather conditions is a resulting from cloud contamination. As a result, this paper proposed the use of the convolutional autoencoder neural networks to remove clouds from cloud-contaminated images by training on a multi-temporal remote sensing dataset. Here, the observations from different spectral bands are assumed to be independent since their spectral responses are usually non-overlapped. From this assumption, each convolutional autoencoder neural networks are trained with the observation from only one spectral band. In our method, we have three convolutional autoencoder neural networks for red, green and blue spectral bands. The experiments were conducted on both synthesis and real dataset derived from the actual LANDSAT 8 images from the central part of Thailand where our algorithm has shown to have a superb performance.