Cloud Imputation for Multi-sensor Remote Sensing Imagery with Style Transfer

Widely used optical remote sensing images are often contaminated by clouds. The missing or cloud-contaminated data leads to incorrect predictions by the downstream machine learning tasks. However, the availability of multi-sensor remote sensing imagery has great potential for improving imputation under clouds. Existing cloud imputation methods could generally preserve the spatial structure in the imputed regions, however, the spectral distribution does not match the target image due to differences in sensor characteristics and temporal differences. In this paper, we present a novel deep learning-based multi-sensor imputation technique inspired by the computer vision-based style transfer. The proposed deep learning framework consists of two modules: (i) cluster-based attentional instance normalization (CAIN), and (ii) adaptive instance normalization (AdaIN). The combined module, CAINA, exploits the style information from cloud-free regions. These regions (land cover) were obtained through clustering to reduce the style differences between the target and predicted image patches. We have conducted extensive experiments and made comparisons against the state-of-the-art methods using a benchmark dataset with images from Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 satellites. Our experiments show that the proposed CAINA is at least 24.49% better on MSE and 18.38% better on cloud MSE as compared to state-of-the-art methods.