Combined haze and cirrus removal for multispectral imagery

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 (TOA) 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