Cloud and snow detection of remote sensing images based on improved Unet3+

Cloud detection is an important step in remote sensing image processing and a prerequisite for subsequent analysis and interpretation of remote sensing images. Traditional cloud detection methods are difficult to accurately detect clouds and snow with very similar features such as color and texture. In this paper, the features of cloud and snow in remote sensing images are deeply extracted, and an accurate cloud and snow detection method is proposed based on the advantages of Unet3+ network in feature fusion. Firstly, color space conversion is performed on remote sensing images, RGB images and HIS images are used as input of Unet3+ network. Resnet 50 is used to replace the Unet3+ feature extraction network to extract remote sensing image features at a deeper level, and add the Convolutional Block Attention Module in Resnet50 to improve the network’s attention to cloud and snow. Finally, the weighted cross entropy loss is constructed to solve the problem of unbalanced sample number caused by high proportion of background area in the image. The results show that the proposed method has strong adaptability and moderate computation. The mPA value, mIoU value and mPrecision value can reach 92.76%, 81.74% and 86.49%, respectively. Compared with other algorithms, the proposed method can better eliminate all kinds of interference information in remote sensing images of different landforms and accurately detect cloud and snow in images.