Detection and substitution of clouds/hazes and their cast shadows on IKONOS images

Frequently cloudy conditions in moist tropical regions often cause difficulty in acquiring good‐quality remote‐sensing images. This paper explores approaches to detect clouds/hazes and their cast shadows on IKONOS images. Two approaches based on maximum and minimum filters and the second‐moment texture measures were tested. The detected clouds/hazes and their cast shadows in one image were then replaced with the pixel values from the same location of another image after image normalization. This research indicates that both the approaches developed in this paper have successfully detected the clouds/hazes and their cast shadows on IKONOS images. In particular, the second‐moment texture approach is recommended.