Energy-based cloud detection in multispectral images based on the SVM technique

In this paper, the energy characteristics of Gabor texture are used for cloud detection in high-resolution multispectral images. First, the satellite remote-sensing image is divided into superpixels using simple linear iterative clustering (SLIC), and then, the energy characteristics of Gabor texture and spectral characteristics are computed by extracting the texture features of the superpixels. The features of the cloud superpixels are used as the learning sample of the support vector machine (SVM) classifier, and a classification model is obtained by training the SVM classifier. Finally, a cloud-detection experiment is conducted for various sensor images with three visible bands and one near-infrared band. The experimental results showed that the proposed method provides an excellent average overall accuracy for thick and thin clouds in a complex background of forests, harbours, snow and mountains. The characteristic parameters of this paper are not limited by the image parameters; thus, they provide good results and universality for various types of sensors.