LWCDnet: A Lightweight Network for Efficient Cloud Detection in Remote Sensing Images

Cloud detection is the task of detecting cloud areas in remote sensing images, and it has attracted extensive research interest. Recently, deep learning-based methods have been proposed and achieved great performance for cloud detection. However, due to the satellite’s limitation in storage and memory, existing deep learning approaches, which suffer from extensive computation and large model size, are almost impossible to be deployed on satellites. To fill this gap, we target at studying effective and efficient cloud detection solutions that are suitable for satellites. In this paper, we develop a lightweight autoencoder-based cloud detection method, namely LWCDnet. In the encoder part, the designed novel lightweight dual-branch block (LWDBB) in the backbone extracts spatial and contextual information concurrently. Moreover, a lightweight feature pyramid module (LWFPM) is proposed to capture high-level multi-scale contextual information. In the decoder part, the lightweight feature fusion module (LWFFM) compensates for the missing spatial and detail information from the encoder to the high-level feature maps. We evaluate the proposed method on two public datasets: LandSat8 and MODIS. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed LWCDnet achieves comparable accuracy as the-state-of-art cloud detection methods and lightweight semantic segmentation algorithms. Meantime LWCDnet has much less computation burden with smaller model size.