A block-based method for the remote sensing images cloud detection and removal

This paper aims to effectively detect and remove clouds on remote sensing (RS) images. The proposed algorithm has a two-stage procedure: (a) an efficient cloud detection algorithm and (b) an efficient inpainting algorithm for image reconstruction. We introduce an inpainting method to recover the images with cloud occlusion from the remote sensing image's surfaces using block-matching. The proposed approach has been evaluated on the remote sensing RGB image dataset with various aerial sceneries. Compared with traditional inpainting methods, both qualitative and quantitative results show that our approach has advantages over state-of-the-art methods.