Contrast Enhancement of Poor-Quality Satellite Images Through Morphological Operations

Abstract

As a fruit of technological advancement, satellite images have been applied in many scientific fields, especially in surveillance. However, some satellite images are taken from an ultrahigh orbit in very dim situation. Data loss might occur due to the weak contrast between the dull pixels in such images, which cover a vast geographical area. Thus, it is necessary to improve the quality and contrast of satellite images. There are only a few techniques to improve the view and contrast of these images. To make matters worse, the contrast enhancement methods face many drawbacks. After estimating the brightness of each pixel, this paper integrates improved discrete wavelet transform (IDWT) with improved fuzzy C means clustering (IFCM) segment each poor-quality satellite image into multiple homogenous parts, and carries out morphological operations to enhance the contrast of the image. In addition, the proposed method was compared with traditional approaches. The results show that our method achieved the best performance in improving the quality of satellite images.