CloudMamba: An Uncertainty-Guided Dual-Scale Mamba Network for Cloud Detection in Remote Sensing Imagery

TL;DR

CloudMamba introduces an uncertainty-guided dual-stage and dual-scale deep learning framework for precise cloud detection in remote sensing imagery, effectively handling thin clouds and boundary details with high efficiency.

Contribution

It proposes a novel two-stage uncertainty-guided segmentation strategy combined with a dual-scale CNN-Mamba architecture, improving accuracy and efficiency over existing methods.

Findings

Outperforms existing methods on public datasets in segmentation accuracy.

Maintains linear computational complexity unlike Transformer-based models.

Provides high process transparency and robustness in cloud delineation.

Abstract

Cloud detection in remote sensing imagery is a fundamental, critical, and highly challenging problem. Existing deep learning-based cloud detection methods generally formulate it as a single-stage pixel-wise binary segmentation task with one forward pass. However, such single-stage approaches exhibit ambiguity and uncertainty in thin-cloud regions and struggle to accurately handle fragmented clouds and boundary details. In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning framework termed CloudMamba. To address the ambiguity in thin-cloud regions, we introduce an uncertainty-guided two-stage cloud detection strategy. An embedded uncertainty estimation module is proposed to automatically quantify the confidence of thin-cloud segmentation, and a second-stage refinement segmentation is introduced to improve the accuracy in low-confidence hard regions. To better handle fragmented clouds and fine-grained boundary details, we design a dual-scale Mamba network based on a CNN-Mamba hybrid architecture. Compared with Transformer-based models with quadratic computational complexity, the proposed method maintains linear computational complexity while effectively capturing both large-scale structural characteristics and small-scale boundary details of clouds, enabling accurate delineation of overall cloud morphology and precise boundary segmentation. Extensive experiments conducted on the GF1_WHU and Levir_CS public datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms existing approaches across multiple segmentation accuracy metrics, while offering high efficiency and process transparency. Our code is available at https://github.com/jayoungo/CloudMamba.