A hybrid approach to clouds and shadows removal in satellite images

This work aims to overcome a common problem in many satellite images, which is the presence of undesirable atmospheric components such as clouds and shadows at the time of scene capture. The presence of such elements can hinder the identification of image objects, urban environmental monitoring, and subsequent steps of the digital image processing like segmentation and classification. Thus, this work presents a new way to perform a hybrid approach toward removal and replacing of these elements in satellite images. The authors propose a method of regions decomposition using nonlinear median filter in order to map the regions of structure and texture. In this areas will be applied the methods of inpainting, by smoothing based on DCT, and exemplar-based texture synthesis, respectively. Finally, it was found the effectiveness of this technique through a qualitative evaluation at the same time that a discussion about quantitative analysis is made.