Quite thrilled to share our latest review on the cloud and cloud shadow detection. This seminal work is collaboratively accomplished by our marvelous Principal Investigator – Prof. Qihao WENG as well as our Research Assistant Professor – Dr. Zhiwei LI.

This review first analyzes the trends of the field, summarizes the progress and achievements in the cloud and cloud shadow detection methods in terms of features, algorithms, and validation of results, and then discusses existing problems, and provides our prospects at the end. The review aims at identifying the emerging research trends and opportunities, while providing guidance for selecting the most suitable methods for coping with cloud contaminated problems faced by optical satellite images, an extremely important issue for remote sensing of cloudy and rainy areas. In the future, expected improvements in accuracy and generalizability, the combination of physical models and deep learning, as well as artificial intelligence and online big data processing platforms will be able to further promote processing efficiency and facilitate applications of image time series. In addition, this review collects the latest open-source tools and datasets for cloud and cloud shadow detection and launches an online project (Open Satellite Image Cloud Detection Resources, i.e., OpenSICDR) to share the latest research outputs (https://github.com/dr-lizhiwei/OpenSICDR).

Paper link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0924271622000934.