Abstract: Optical satellite remote sensing images of tropical and subtropical vegetation areas are often affected by cloud cover, leading to missing remote sensing information of surface features. Effectively detecting clouds, classifying clouds and objects, and extracting cloud cover information remain hot topics and challenges in remote sensing research. Many optical cameras in domestic satellites lack the short-wave and thermal infrared spectral bands, which are used in prevailing cloud detection algorithms, reducing the image data availability after cloud removal. Hence, this study suggested detecting the spatial distribution of cloud cover by utilizing only several spectral bands in the visible light - near-infrared range (400 nm to 1 000 nm). Based on the hyperspectral remote sensing images from the Zhuhai-1 satellite, this study constructed feature space scatter plots using spectral indices, including normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) and normalized differential water index (NDWI), for cloud/object classification and detection. Moreover, this study extracted the cloud, water, and vegetation cover information from mixed pixels. The results demonstrate that compared to conventional cloud detection methods using spectral index thresholds, the cloud detection algorithm under the NDWI-NDVI feature space used in this study exhibited a superior cloud-water separation capability and simple operability. It can precisely describe the spatial distribution characteristics of cloud cover by suppressing the shadow effect on cloud cover. Overall, this study offers a novel technical approach for further developing cloud detection, cloud-water separation, and cloud cover information extraction algorithms for domestic optical satellite remote sensing data.