Journal Article

Physics-Prior-Guided Feature Pyramid Network for Unified Multi-Angle Spectral–Polarimetric Cloud Detection

Gan, Yongyin, Wang, Xinqiang, Ji, Xingyuan, Wang, Fangyuan, Ye, Song, Chu, Xiaoxue, Zhang, Ziyang, Li, Shu

2026

Overview

Accurate cloud detection remains a significant challenge due to the spectral ambiguity between clouds and bright or heterogeneous surfaces (e.g., snow, desert). While multi-angle and polarization data offer rich information, the discriminative power of joint spectral analysis for resolving these ambiguities has been underexploited. In this work, we demonstrate that physically motivated spectral band ratios and differences can robustly enhance cloud signatures. Motivated by this insight, we propose a novel deep learning framework, the Multi-angle Polarization Feature Pyramid Structure (MP-FPS), that explicitly leverages joint spectral features as discriminative priors. Our architecture employs a dual-branch network to disentangle and adaptively fuse spectral and multi-angle polarization modalities. Within this framework, a hierarchical, multi-scale cross-channel multi-angle fusion module dynamically captures spatial–spectral–angular dependencies, enriching the structural representation of clouds. Furthermore, a channel-space dual-path attention mechanism refines sub-pixel responses, significantly improving detection accuracy in challenging regions such as cloud edges and thin cirrus. Evaluated on the global POLDER-3 dataset, MP-FPS achieves a mean Intersection over Union (mIoU) of 0.8662 across diverse surface types, surpassing the official baseline by 12.4%. This study establishes joint spectral analysis as a critical enabler for high-precision cloud masking, and demonstrates its synergistic value when integrated with multi-angle polarimetric information in a unified deep architecture.

• Publisher: MDPI AG
• Subject: Algorithms / Artificial intelligence / attention mechanism / cloud detection / Clouds / Comparative analysis / Deep learning / Deserts / Feature extraction / feature pyramid network / Ice / Identification and classification / joint spectral analysis / Machine vision / Masking / Methods / multi-angle polarization / Multispectral photography / Neural networks / Physics / Polarimetry / Polarization / Polders / Political aspects / Remote sensing / Sensors / Snow / Spectral analysis / spectral-polarimetric fusion / Spectrum analysis / Technology application