Cloud detection is a crucial task in satellite remote sensing, influencing applications such as vegetation indices, land use analysis, and renewable energy estimation. This study evaluates the performance of cloud masks generated for KOMPSAT-3 and KOMPSAT-3A imagery using the DeepLabV3+ deep learning model with a ResNet-101 backbone. To overcome the limitations of digital number (DN) data, Top-of-Atmosphere (TOA) reflectance was computed and used for model training. Comparative analysis between the DN and TOA reflectance demonstrated significant improvements with the TOA correction applied. The TOA reflectance combined with the NDVI channel achieved the highest precision (69.33%) and F1-score (59.27%), along with a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 46.5%, outperforming all the other configurations. In particular, this combination was highly effective in detecting dense clouds, achieving an mIoU of 48.12%, while the Near-Infrared, green, and red (NGR) combination performed best in identifying cloud shadows with an mIoU of 23.32%. These findings highlight the critical role of radiometric correction and optimal channel selection in enhancing deep learning-based cloud detection. This study demonstrates the crucial role of radiometric correction, optimal channel selection, and the integration of additional synthetic indices in enhancing deep learning-based cloud detection performance, providing a foundation for the development of more refined cloud masking techniques in the future.



Keywords: operational system; GK-2A satellite; deep learning; solar radiation; aerosol optical depth