Lidar Cloud Detection with Fully Convolutional Networks

In this contribution, we present a novel approach for segmenting laser radar (lidar) imagery into geometric time-height cloud locations with a fully convolutional network (FCN). We describe a semi-supervised learning method to train the FCN by: pre-training the classification layers of the FCN with "weakly labeled" lidar data, using "unsupervised" pre-training with the cloud locations of the Wang & Sassen (2001) cloud mask algorithm, and fully supervised learning with hand-labeled cloud locations. We show the model achieves higher levels of cloud identification compared to the cloud mask algorithm.