Simultaneous Detection and Removal of High Altitude Clouds from an Image

Interestingly, shape of the high-altitude clouds serves as a beacon for weather forecasting, so its detection is of vital importance. Besides these clouds often cause hindrance in an endeavor of satellites to inspect our world. Even thin clouds produce the undesired superposition of visual information, whose decomposition into the clear background and cloudy layer using a single satellite image is a highly ill-posed problem. In this work, we derive sophisticated image priors by thoroughly analyzing the properties of high-altitude clouds and geological images; and formulate a non-convex optimization scheme, which simultaneously detects and removes the clouds within a few seconds. Experimental results on real world RGB images demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other competitive methods by retaining the comprehensive background details and producing the precise shape of the cloudy layer.