6533b7d7fe1ef96bd126788a

RESEARCH PRODUCT

Convolutional Neural Networks for Cloud Screening: Transfer Learning from Landsat-8 to Proba-V

subject

description

Cloud detection is a key issue for exploiting the information from Earth observation satellites multispectral sensors. For Proba-V, cloud detection is challenging due to the limited number of spectral bands. Advanced machine learning methods, such as convolutional neural networks (CNN), have shown to work well on this problem provided enough labeled data. However, simultaneous collocated information about the presence of clouds is usually not available or requires a great amount of manual labor. In this work, we propose to learn from the available Landsat −8 cloud masks datasets and transfer this learning to solve the Proba-V cloud detection problem. CNN are trained with Landsat images adapted to resemble Proba-V characteristics and tested on a large set of real Proba-V scenes. Developed models outperform current operational Proba-V cloud detection without being trained with any real Proba-V data. Moreover, cloud detection accuracy can be further increased if the CNN are fine-tuned using a limited amount of Proba-V data.