Thick Cloud Removal for Multitemporal Remote Sensing Images: When Tensor Ring Decomposition Meets Gradient Domain Fidelity

Thick clouds in remote sensing (RS) images deteriorate the visual quality and hinder subsequent applications. The emerging multitemporal RS images with rich temporal information bring the opportunity for cloud removal. How to effectively exploit the rich temporal information of the multitemporal RS images remains challenging. As multitemporal RS images with the same geographic scene, the spatial gradient of RS images at different time nodes has a resemblance, which can guide the reconstruction of the cloudy region. Motivated by this, we suggest a gradient domain fidelity with respect to the guided gradient for thick cloud removal in multitemporal RS images, which faithfully preserves the fine edges and textures compared to the original pixel domain fidelity. Armed with the gradient domain fidelity, we propose a low-rank tensor ring decomposition model (TRGFid) for the thick cloud removal problem. In the proposed model, the guided gradient of the cloudy region is availably estimated by using the regression method from the cloud-free region of different time nodes. Moreover, we develop an efficient proximal alternating minimization-based algorithm for solving the proposed nonconvex model. Extensive simulated and real experiments show that the proposed method outperforms its competitors, and preserves fine edges and textures.