1 research outputs found
ISLAND: Informing Brightness and Surface Temperature Through a Land Cover-based Interpolator
Cloud occlusion is a common problem in the field of remote sensing,
particularly for thermal infrared imaging. Remote sensing thermal instruments
onboard operational satellites are supposed to enable frequent and
high-resolution observations over land; unfortunately, clouds adversely affect
thermal signals by blocking outgoing longwave radiation emission from Earth's
surface, interfering with the retrieved ground emission temperature. Such cloud
contamination severely reduces the set of serviceable thermal images for
downstream applications, making it impractical to perform intricate time-series
analysis of land surface temperature (LST). In this paper, we introduce a novel
method to remove cloud occlusions from Landsat 8 LST images. We call our method
ISLAND, an acronym for Informing Brightness and Surface Temperature Through a
Land Cover-based Interpolator. Our approach uses thermal infrared images from
Landsat 8 (at 30 m resolution with 16-day revisit cycles) and the NLCD land
cover dataset. Inspired by Tobler's first law of Geography, ISLAND predicts
occluded brightness temperature and LST through a set of spatio-temporal
filters that perform distance-weighted spatio-temporal interpolation. A
critical feature of ISLAND is that the filters are land cover-class aware,
making it particularly advantageous in complex urban settings with
heterogeneous land cover types and distributions. Through qualitative and
quantitative analysis, we show that ISLAND achieves robust reconstruction
performance across a variety of cloud occlusion and surface land cover
conditions, and with a high spatio-temporal resolution. We provide a public
dataset of 20 U.S. cities with pre-computed ISLAND thermal infrared and LST
outputs. Using several case studies, we demonstrate that ISLAND opens the door
to a multitude of high-impact urban and environmental applications across the
continental United States.Comment: 22 pages, 9 figure