Cloud Removal Using Multimodal GAN With Adversarial Consistency Loss

In the field of remote sensing image processing, clouds heavily affect the quality of the remote sensing images and their application potential. Thus, in recent years, with the prevalence of deep learning techniques used in the field of image processing, many methods have been proposed for cloud removal using single remote sensing images. The existing single-image cloud removal methods suffer from poor generalization capabilities that prevent them from being applied to diverse remote sensing images. Thus, a novel method using a multimodal architecture is proposed which provides multiple most likely outputs for the image and selects the best one through perception-based image quality evaluator (PIQE). In addition, adversarial consistency loss is used to replace cycle consistency loss, which encourages the model to retain more texture information of the original image, and thus the quality of the generated image increases. Experiments demonstrate that the presented method can easily achieve a considerable increase in the peak signal-to-noise ratio and the structural similarity index compared with other methods.