A Modified Version of the Direct Sampling Method for Filling Gaps in Landsat 7 and Sentinel 2 Satellite Imagery in the Coastal Area of Rhone River

Abstract

Earth Observation (EO) data, such as Landsat 7 (L7) and Sentinel 2 (S2) imagery, are often used to monitor the state of natural resources all over the world. However, this type of data tends to suffer from high cloud cover percentages during rainfall/snow seasons. This has led researchers to focus on developing algorithms for filling gaps in optical satellite imagery. The present work proposes two modifications to an existing gap-filling approach known as the Direct Sampling (DS) method. These modifications refer to ensuring the algorithm starts filling unknown pixels (UPs) that have a specified minimum number of known neighbors (Nx) and to reducing the search area to pixels that share similar reflectance as the Nx of the selected UP. Experiments were performed on images acquired from coastal water bodies in France. The validation of the modified gap-filling approach was performed by imposing artificial gaps on originally gap-free images and comparing the simulated images with the real ones. Results indicate that satisfactory performance can be achieved for most spectral bands. Moreover, it appears that the bi-layer (BL) version of the algorithm tends to outperform the uni-layer (UL) version in terms of overall accuracy. For instance, in the case of B04 of an L7 image with a cloud percentage of 27.26%, accuracy values for UL and BL simulations are, respectively, 64.05 and 79.61%. Furthermore, it has been confirmed that the introduced modifications have indeed helped in improving the overall accuracy and in reducing the processing time. As a matter of fact, the implementation of a conditional filling path (minNx = 4) and a targeted search (n2 = 200) when filling cloud gaps in L7 imagery has contributed to an average increase in accuracy of around 35.06% and an average gain in processing time by around 78.18%, respectively.