Real-Time Automatic Cloud Detection during the Process of Taking Aerial Photographs

The present paper adopted a method based on the spectrum signatures with thresholds to detect cloud. Through analyzing the characteristic in the aspect of spectrum signatures of cloud, two effective signatures were explored, one was brightness signature I and the other was normalized difference signature P. Combined with corresponding thresholds, each spectrum condition can detect some cloud pixels. By composing the union of two spectrum conditions together, cloud can be detected more completely. In addition, the threshold was also very important to the accuracy of the detection result. In order to detect cloud efficiently, correctly and automatically, this paper proposed a new strategy about the assignment of thresholds to acquire suitable thresholds. Firstly, the images should be classified into three kinds of types which were images with no cloud, with thin cloud and with thick cloud. Secondly, different assignment methods of automatic thresholds of signatures would be adopted according to different types of images. For images with thick cloud, they would be further classified into three kinds by another standard and assigned by different thresholds integrated by automatic thresholds from other spectrum signatures. The automatic thresholds were acquired by Otsu algorithm and an improved Otsu algorithm. For images with thin cloud, the cloud would be detected by score algorithm. Due to this flexible strategy, cloud in images can be detected rightly and if there isn't cloud in images the detection will be null to show that there is no cloud. Compared to the detection results of other different methods, the contrast results show that the efficiency of the detection method proposed in this paper is high and the accuracy satisfies the demand of real-time evaluation and the application range is wider.