Removal of Stripes in Remote Sensing Images Based on Statistics Combined with Image Enhancement

A method to remove stripes from remote sensing images is proposed based on statistics and a new image enhancement method. The overall processing steps for improving the quality of remote sensing images are introduced to provide a general baseline. Due to the differences in satellite sensors when producing images, subtle but inherent stripes can appear at the stitching positions between the sensors. These stitchingstripes cannot be eliminated by conventional relative radiometric calibration. The inherent stitching stripes cause difficulties in downstream tasks such as the segmentation, classification and interpretation of remote sensing images. Therefore, a method to remove the stripes based on statistics and a new image enhancement approach are proposed in this paper. First, the inconsistency in grayscales around stripes is eliminated with the statistical method. Second, the pixels within stripes are weighted and averaged based on updated pixel values to enhance the uniformity of the overall image radiation quality. Finally, the details of the images are highlighted by a new image enhancement method, which makes the whole image clearer. Comprehensive experiments are performed, and the results indicate that the proposed method outperforms the baseline approach in terms of visual quality and radiation correction accuracy.