Scale aware remote sensing image enhancement using rolling guidance

Enhancement of remotely sensed images is a challenging problem, since the enhanced image has to have an improved contrast and edge information while preserving the original radiance values as much as possible. In this paper, a scale aware enhancement method based on rolling guidance is proposed for remotely sensed images. For each scale, a guidance image is defined and the approximation image is provided by an iterative joint filtering of the approximation and guidance images. Then the extracted details are amplified through an adaptive scheme and added to the final level approximation layer to provide the resulting enhanced image. A comparative study between the proposed methods with classical edge preserving filters and traditional methods have been carried out by using several criteria. The proposed methods have an average of 12% improvement for contrast gain (CG) metric and 81% improvement for enhancement measurement (EME) metric compared to the closest comparison method.