RSCNN: A CNN-Based Method to Enhance Low-Light Remote-Sensing Images

Image enhancement (IE) technology can help enhance the brightness of remote-sensing images to obtain better interpretation and visualization effects. Convolutional neural networks (CNN), such as the Low-light CNN (LLCNN) and Super-resolution CNN (SRCNN), have achieved great success in image enhancement, image super resolution, and other image-processing applications. Therefore, we adopt CNN to propose a new neural network architecture with end-to-end strategy for low-light remote-sensing IE, named remote-sensing CNN (RSCNN). In RSCNN, an upsampling operator is adopted to help learn more multi-scaled features. With respect to the lack of labeled training data in remote-sensing image datasets for IE, we use real natural image patches to train firstly and then perform fine-tuning operations with simulated remote-sensing image pairs. Reasonably designed experiments are carried out, and the results quantitatively show the superiority of RSCNN in terms of structural similarity index (SSIM) and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) over conventional techniques for low-light remote-sensing IE. Furthermore, the results of our method have obvious qualitative advantages in denoising and maintaining the authenticity of colors and textures.