The clouds play a major role in satellite imagery. The regions which are not captured by the sensor due to cloud cover need to be accurately replaced by the available data for further applications. For this purpose, the cloudy regions have to be detected accurately and removed. There are various traditional techniques for detecting the clouds as well as the cloud shadows. This work focuses on analysing the basic cloud detection algorithms namely Average Brightness Threshold and Region Growing. The results are compared and the best suited algorithm is identified based on various metrics and parameters. © 2014, Research India Publications.