ShuffleCloudNet: A Lightweight Composite Neural Network-Based Method for Cloud Computation in Remote-Sensing Images (vol 14, 5258, 2022)

The occlusion of cloud layers affects the accurate acquisition of ground object information and causes a large amount of useless remote-sensing data transmission and processing, wasting storage, as well as computing resources. Therefore, in this paper, we designed a lightweight composite neural network model to calculate the cloud amount in high-resolution visible remote-sensing images by training the model using thumbnail images and browsing images in remote-sensing images. The training samples were established using paired thumbnail images and browsing images, and the cloud-amount calculation model was obtained by training a proposed composite neural network. The strategy used the thumbnail images for preliminary judgment and the browsing images for accurate calculation, and this combination can quickly determine the cloud amount. The multi-scale confidence fusion module and bag-of-words loss function were redesigned to achieve fast and accurate calculation of cloud-amount data from remote-sensing images. This effectively alleviates the problem of low cloud-amount calculation, thin clouds not being counted as clouds, and that of ice and clouds being confused as in existing methods. Furthermore, a complete dataset of cloud-amount calculation for remote-sensing images, CTI_RSCloud, was constructed for training and testing. The experimental results show that, with less than 13 MB of parameters, the proposed lightweight network model greatly improves the timeliness of cloud-amount calculation, with a runtime is in the millisecond range. In addition, the calculation accuracy is better than the classic lightweight networks and backbone networks of the best cloud-detection models.