An efficient multi-resolution variational Retinex scheme for the radiometric correction of airborne remote sensing images.

The brightness non-uniformity caused by vignetting effects, viewing, and illumination angels in remote sensing images reduces the interpretation precision. A multi-resolution variational Retinex scheme is proposed in this paper to efficiently correct the non-uniform brightness in airborne remote sensing images. This variational Retinex model is non-linear, constrained by the grey-world assumption and the total variation regularization. A Gaussian image pyramid is used to construct the multi-resolution scheme. The multi-resolution scheme reduces the calculation burden and raises the calculation efficiency. The fast split Bregman (SB) iteration method is employed to optimize the proposed non-linear model in each level of the multi-resolution scheme. This decomposes the complicated model into several simple sub-problems and greatly improves the calculation efficiency. The multi-resolution scheme embedded with the SB iteration method was applied to both synthetic and real remote sensing images. The experimental results show that the brightness non-uniformity can be corrected, and the spectral information can be effectively restored. Moreover, the calculation efficiency is raised by about 60–110 times, compared to the traditional single-resolution solving method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]