Haze and Thin Cloud Removal Using Elliptical Boundary Prior for Remote Sensing Image

Remote sensing images play important roles in various earth surface observation applications. However, the hazy state of surface atmosphere can visually decrease the contrast and availability of remote sensing images. In this paper, we propose a haze and thin cloud removal method for single visible remote sensing images, which aims to robustly estimate haze thickness, atmospheric light, and transmission value from a remote sensing image with dense haze or thin cloud, and finally recovers a haze-free image. An elliptical boundary prior (EBP) is proposed to transform the haze thickness in each local patch from the pixels cluster in the spectral space, which is surrounded by an ellipse. With the aim of preventing highlight objects influences, an atmospheric light estimation approach is presented. The correlation of transmission and haze thickness is reconstructed to develop the scattering model for remote sensing images. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can not only significantly improve the contrast and restore textures of various kinds of hazy remote sensing images but also well preserve the spectral information of visible bands.