DABNet: Deformable Contextual and Boundary-Weighted Network for Cloud Detection in Remote Sensing Images

In recent years, deep convolutional neural networks (DCNNs) have made significant progress in cloud detection tasks, and the detection accuracy has been greatly improved. However, most existing CNN-based models have high computational complexity, which limits their practical application, especially for spaceborne optical remote sensing. In addition, most of the methods cannot make adaptive adjustments based on the structural information of the clouds, and blurred boundaries often occur in the detection results. In order to address these problems, this article proposes a lightweight network (DABNet) to achieve high-accuracy detection of complex clouds, not only a clearer boundary but also lower false-alarm rate. Specifically, a deformable context feature pyramid module is proposed to improve the adaptive modeling capability of multiscale features. Besides, a boundary-weighted loss function is designed to direct the network to focus on cloud boundary information and optimize the relevant detection results. The proposed method has been validated on two data sets: the public GF-1 WFV benchmark and our self-built GF-2 cloud detection data set with higher spatial resolution. The experimental results exhibit that DABNet achieves state-of-the-art performance while only using 4.12M parameters and 8.29G multiadds.