CLOUD AND CLOUD SHADOW MASKING USING MULTI-TEMPORAL CLOUD MASKING ALGORITHM IN TROPICAL ENVIRONMENTAL

Abstract

A cloud masking approach based on multi-temporal satellite images is proposed. The basic idea of this approach is to detect cloud and cloud shadow by using the difference reflectance values between clear pixels and cloud and cloud shadow contaminated pixels. Several bands of satellite image which have big difference values are selected for developing Multi-temporal Cloud Masking (MCM) algorithm. Some experimental analyses are conducted by using Landsat-8 images. Band 3 and band 4 are selected because they can distinguish between cloud and non cloud. Afterwards, band 5 and band 6 are used to distinguish between cloud shadow and clear. The results show that the MCM algorithm can detect cloud and cloud shadow appropriately. Moreover, qualitative and quantitative assessments are conducted using visual inspections and confusion matrix, respectively, to evaluate the reliability of this algorithm. Comparison between this algorithm and QA band are conducted to prove the reliability of the approach. The results show that MCM better than QA band and the accuracy of the results are very high.