Thick Cloud Removal in Multi-Temporal Remote Sensing Images via Frequency Spectrum-Modulated Tensor Completion

Clouds often contaminate remote sensing images, which leads to missing land feature information and subsequent application degradation. Low-rank tensor completion has shown great potential in the reconstruction of multi-temporal remote sensing images. However, existing methods ignore different low-rank properties in the spatial and temporal dimensions, such that they cannot utilize spatial and temporal information adequately. In this paper, we propose a new frequency spectrum-modulated tensor completion method (FMTC). First, remote sensing images are rearranged as third-order spatial–temporal tensors for each band. Then, Fourier transform (FT) is introduced in the temporal dimension of the rearranged tensor to generate a spatial–frequential tensor. In view of the fact that land features represent low-frequency components and fickle clouds represent high-frequency components in the time domain, we chose adaptive weights for the completion of different low-rank spatial matrixes, according to the frequency spectrum. Then, Invert Fourier Transform (IFT) was implemented. Through this method, the joint low-rank spatial–temporal constraint was achieved. The simulated data experiments demonstrate that FMTC is applicable on different land-cover types and different missing sizes. With real data experiments, we have validated the effectiveness and stability of FMTC for time-series remote sensing image reconstruction. Compared with other algorithms, the performance of FMTC is better in quantitative and qualitative terms, especially when considering the spectral accuracy and temporal continuity.