Thick Cloud Removal in Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images via Low-Rank Regularized Self-Supervised Network

The existence of thick clouds covers the comprehensive Earth observation of optical remote sensing images (RSIs). Cloud removal is an effective and economical preprocessing step to improve the subsequent applications of RSIs. Deep learning (DL)-based methods have attracted much attention and achieved state-of-the-art results. However, most of these methods suffer from the following issues: 1) ignore the physical characteristics of RSIs; 2) require paired images with/without cloud or extra auxiliary images; and 3) demand the cloud mask. These issues might have limited the flexibility of existing networks. In this article, we propose a novel low-rank regularized self-supervised network (LRRSSN) that couples model-driven and data-driven methods to remove the thick cloud from multitemporal RSIs (MRSIs). First, motivated by the equal importance of image and cloud components as well as their intrinsic characteristics, we decompose the observed image into low-rank image and structural sparse cloud components. In this way, we obtain a model-driven thick cloud removal method where the spectral–temporal low-rank correlation of the image component and the spectral structural sparsity of the cloud component are effectively exploited. Second, to capture the complex nonlinear features of different scenarios, the data-driven self-supervised network that does not require external training datasets is designed to explore the deep prior of the image component. Third, the coupled model-driven and data-driven LRRSSN is optimized by an efficient half quadratic splitting (HQS) algorithm. Finally, without knowing the exact cloud mask, we estimate the cloud mask to preserve information in cloud-free areas as much as possible. Experiments conducted in synthetic and real-world scenarios demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.