Framelet-based sparse regularization for uneven intensity correction of remote sensing images in a retinex variational framework

Correcting uneven intensity distribution from a single image has long been a challenging problem with remote sensing image. In this paper, an analysis-based sparse prior is employed in the retinex variational framework for the uneven intensity correction of remote sensing images. This sparse regularization model is used to adjust uneven intensity by regularizing the sparsity of the reflectance component under framelet transform. Furthermore, the alternating minimization algorithm and split Bregman method are adopted to solve the framelet-based sparse regularization model. The experiments, with both simulated images and real-life images, show that the proposed model can effectively correct the uneven intensity distribution.