Combined haze and cirrus removal for multispectral imagery

Abstract

Multispectral satellite images are often contaminated by haze and/or cirrus. A previous paper presented a haze removal method that calculates a haze thickness map (HTM) based on a local search of dark objects. The haze-free signal is restored by subtracting the HTM from the hazy image assuming an additive model of the haze influence. The HTM method is substantially improved by employing the 1.38-μm cirrus band. The top-of-atmosphere reflectance cirrus band is used as an additional source of information. The method restores the information in highly inhomogeneous surfaces attenuated by a low-altitude haze and high-altitude cirrus, improving the interpretation of the scene content while preserving the shape of the spectral signatures. The new enhanced HTM method is successfully applied to Landsat-8 OLI and Sentinel-2 real and simulated scenes.