Abstract:To eliminate the impacts of cloud interference on the accuracy and applicability of water body extraction based on the satellite remote sensing, a reconstruction method for the continuous water body is developed by combining the high-precision terrain information and the GF-1 satellite imageries. Firstly, the GF-1 satellite imageries and high-precision contour terrain data are preprocessed and then, a buffer zone is set up to extract the part of the water body that is not covered by clouds through multiple iterations. Thereafter, the water level of water body is determined through image operations, such as the geographic referencing of two kinds of data and the statistical operation, so that the water surface area under the influence of clouds can be restored. The results show that the developed method can effectively eliminate the influence of clouds. According to the water body extraction results from seven cloud-interfered images, the average relative error of the extracted water areas is less than 5%. Comparing to the reference values, the average bias of the extracted water areas is 0.0809km2 , which indicates that this method can accurately restore the water area under the conditions of cloud interference and has a high potential for extracting water bodies from cloud influenced images.