GF-1/6 Satellite Pixel-by-Pixel Quality Tagging Algorithm

The Landsat and Sentinel series satellites contain their own quality tagging data products, marking the source image pixel by pixel with several specific semantic categories. These data products generally contain categories such as cloud, cloud shadow, land, water body, and snow. Due to the lack of mid-wave and thermal infrared bands, the accuracy of traditional cloud detection algorithm is unstable when facing Chinese Gaofen-1/6 (GF-1/6) data. Moreover, it is challenging to distinguish clouds from snow. In order to produce GF-1/6 satellite pixel-by-pixel quality tagging data products, this paper builds a training sample set of more than 100,000 image pairs, primarily using Sentinel-2 satellite data. Then, we adopt the Swin Transformer model with a self-attention mechanism for GF-1/6 satellite image quality tagging. Experiments show that the model’s overall accuracy reaches the level of Fmask v4.6 with more than 10,000 training samples, and the model can distinguish between cloud and snow correctly. Our GF-1/6 quality tagging algorithm can meet the requirements of the “Analysis Ready Data (ARD) Technology Research for Domestic Satellite” project.