Cloud removal using SAR and optical images via attention mechanism-based GAN

Clouds often appear in remote sensing images, which seriously affect the application of remote sensing images. Therefore, cloud removal is an important preprocessing process in remote sensing image applications. In this paper, we propose a generative adversarial network-based cloud removal method for optical remote sensing images with the assistance of synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. Our model is an end-to-end model, which consists of a translation module, an attention module, a generator, and a discriminator. We introduce the attention mechanism to accurately locate the cloud regions. With the obtained attention maps as the prior information, the proposed method can remove the clouds while preserving the cloud-free regions. In addition, we include the structural similarity index (SSIM) and the attention penalty in the loss function to improve the performance of the proposed method. Numerical experiments show that the proposed model provides improved cloud removal performance compared with the state-of-the-art methods.