Clouds in optical remote sensing images cause spectral information change or loss, that affects image analysis and application. Therefore, cloud detection is of great significance. However, there are some shortcomings in current methods, such as the insufficient extendibility due to using the information of multiple bands, the intense extendibility due to relying on some manually determined thresholds, and the limited accuracy, especially for thin clouds or complex scenes caused by low-level manual features. Combining the above shortcomings and the requirements for efficiency in practical applications, we propose a light-weight deep learning cloud detection network based on DeeplabV3+ architecture and channel attention module (CD-AttDLV3+), only using the most common red–green–blue and near-infrared bands. In the CD-AttDLV3+ architecture, an optimized backbone network-MobileNetV2 is used to reduce the number of parameters and calculations. Atrous spatial pyramid pooling effectively reduces the information loss caused by multiple down-samplings while extracting multi-scale features. CD-AttDLV3+ concatenates more low-level features than DeeplabV3+ to improve the cloud boundary quality. The channel attention module is introduced to strengthen the learning of important channels and improve the training efficiency. Moreover, the loss function is improved to alleviate the imbalance of samples. For the Landsat-8 Biome set, CD-AttDLV3+ achieves the highest accuracy in comparison with other methods, including Fmask, SVM, and SegNet, especially for distinguishing clouds from bright surfaces and detecting light-transmitting thin clouds. It can also perform well on other Landsat-8 and Sentinel-2 images. Experimental results indicate that CD-AttDLV3+ is robust, with a high accuracy and extendibility.

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