Cirrus Band-to-Band Registration of Landsat-8 OLI for Thin Cirrus Removal

In the troposphere or stratosphere, high-altitude cirrus clouds often distort remote-sensing images (RSIs). Despite the existence of various methods to eliminate these clouds using the cirrus detection band of the Landsat-8 operational land imager (OLI), there may still be residual traces due to the parallax inherent in the OLI focal plane's design. To address this issue, we propose a technique called cirrus band-to-band registration (CB2BR) and provide evidence that these residual traces are a result of cirrus displacements between the visible bands (Bands 1-4) and Band 9. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed CB2BR, we conducted experiments using three Landsat-8 scenes. The results demonstrate that the CB2BR technique can eliminate artifacts in various algorithms, especially for aircraft-induced line-shaped contrail cirrus. Theoretically, the study investigates the relationship between satellite system parameters, cirrus altitude, and cirrus displacement. The value of the CB2BR technique in subsequent tasks like ship detection is illustrated.