Cloud removal from satellite imagery using multispectral edge-filtered conditional generative adversarial networks

Abstract

We propose a Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) based architecture for removing clouds from satellite imagery. Data used for training comprises of visible light RGB and near-infrared (NIR) band images. The novelty lies in the structure of the discriminator in the GAN architecture, which compares generated and target cloud-free RGB images concatenated with their edge-filtered versions. Experimental results show that our approach to removing clouds outperforms both visually and according to metrics, a benchmark solution that does not take edge filtering into account, and that improvements are robust when varying both training dataset size and NIR cloud penetrability.