An automatic stain removal algorithm of series aerial photograph based on flat-field correction

The dust on the camera's lens will leave dark stains on the image. Calibrating and compensating the intensity of the stained pixels play an important role in the airborne image processing. This article introduces an automatic compensation algorithm for the dark stains. It's based on the theory of flat-field correction. We produced a whiteboard reference image by aggregating hundreds of images recorded in one flight and use their average pixel values to simulate the uniform white light irradiation. Then we constructed a look-up table function based on this whiteboard image to calibrate the stained image. The experiment result shows that the proposed procedure can remove lens stains effectively and automatically.