Real-Time GF-4 Satellite Image Enhancement in Low Light Conditions

GF-4 satellite images suffer from a general drawback of geostationary satellites that lose the efficacy on low light conditions such as gloaming and drawn. This significantly limits the GF-4 applications when disaster happens. In this paper, we investigate a real-time image enhancement technique for GF-4 satellites images on low light conditions and propose a reflectivity-constraint-entropy-maximization (RCEM) strategy to enhance the contrast of GF-4 images. Experiments show that the proposed RCEM outperforms the current state-of-the-art image enhancement techniques which will significantly extend the working time of GF-4 satellite.