[IPOL announce] new article: Cloud Detection by Luminance and Inter-band Parallax Analysis for Pushbroom Satellite Imagers

[announcements about the IPOL journal]

A new article is available in IPOL: https://www.ipol.im/pub/art/2020/271/

Tristan Dagobert, Rafael Grompone von Gioi, Carlo de Franchis, 
Jean-Michel Morel, and Charles Hessel,
Cloud Detection by Luminance and Inter-band Parallax Analysis for 
Pushbroom Satellite Imagers,
Image Processing On Line, 10 (2020), pp. 167–190.
https://doi.org/10.5201/ipol.2020.271

Abstract

This paper proposes a cloud detection algorithm for Earth observation 
images obtained by pushbroom satellite imagers. The pushbroom technology 
induces an inter-band acquisition delay leading to a parallax effect for 
the clouds. We propose a method exploiting this characteristic thanks to 
the analysis of the inter-band disparity. Several other features 
discriminating clouds are also defined and all are merged to build a 
robust a contrario statistical decision. Experiments applied on scenes 
acquired by various pushbroom satellites such as Sentinel-2, RapidEye 
and WorldView-2 show the effectiveness of the proposed method. In 
particular, we demonstrate a balanced accuracy rate close to 98% for 
cloud and non cloud classification for Sentinel-2 images.