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

2026-04-08

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenge of accurately detecting thin clouds, fragmented cloud cover, and fine boundary details in remote sensing imagery. To this end, the authors propose an uncertainty-guided two-stage cloud detection method featuring a dual-scale network architecture that integrates CNN and Mamba components. In the first stage, the model produces an initial segmentation mask while estimating pixel-level uncertainty; in the second stage, it refines predictions specifically within low-confidence regions. An embedded uncertainty estimation module guides the optimization across both stages, enabling effective modeling of multi-scale structures and boundary details while maintaining linear computational complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach significantly outperforms existing methods on the GF1-WHU and LEVIR-CS datasets, achieving high accuracy, computational efficiency, and interpretability throughout the detection process.

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.

Problem

• cloud detection
• remote sensing imagery
• thin-cloud ambiguity
• fragmented clouds
• boundary details

Innovation

• uncertainty-guided
• dual-scale Mamba
• two-stage refinement
• linear complexity
• cloud detection