A remote‐sensing image enhancement algorithm based on patch‐wise dark channel prior and histogram equalisation with colour correction

Abstract The object identification within an image captured during rough weather conditions (such as haze, fog) poses difficulty due to the reduction of an image. The rough weather conditions lead not only to the variation of the image's visual effect but also to the disadvantage of post‐processing of an image. Furthermore, it causes inconvenience of all types of instruments that rely on optical imaging, such as satellite remote‐sensing systems, aerial photo systems, outdoor monitoring systems, and object identification systems, respectively. Hence, the improvement and restorement of the visual effects and enhanced post‐processing are needed. This research introduces a new image enhancement approach for image dehazing based on dark channel prior and piecewise linear transformation; also, the histogram equalisation technique, i.e. contrast limited adaptive histogram equalisation is applied. A dark channel prior is well known for its simplicity and productivity. In this work, the dark channel prior to a new angle is analysed in the first step, where average patch sizes are estimated for the computation of haze densities. Furthermore, the sky is approximated up to 5–10% of the hazy images, which has a good effect in removing the haze from the image. Using the dark channel, the proposed algorithm significantly boosted the effects of the dark images as well as reduced the influence of haze and noise. Eventually, for colour correction, the piecewise linear transformation technique is applied, which enhances the colour close to the original image. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the visibility of the algorithm on dark remote‐sensing images as well as on hazy natural images.