Remote Sensing Image Enhancement by Rolling Guidance and Hazy Image Model

Abstract

An efficient image enhancement method should improve the contrast in the image while keeping the edge and color information. Since existing approaches seem not to fulfill all these demands, a hybrid approach which will combine advantages of individual approaches is proposed in this work. The multiscale bilateral filter is replaced by an iterative joint version where the output is used as guidance image for the next iterations. Then a multiscale structure is designed by the appropriate modifications of the spatial and range kernels as in the multiscale bilateral filter. A final refining is performed by the local use of the Hazy Image Model based method (HIM) on the resulting image. Visual and quantitative comparisons with conventional Discrete Wavelet Transform and Singular Value Decomposition based method (DWT-SVD), Regularized Histogram Equalization with Discrete Cosine Transform method (RHE-DCT), Bilateral Filtering based method (BF), and HIM method demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method and the resulting hybrid method for remote sensing image enhancement.