A VARIATIONAL APPROACH TO THE RADIOMETRIC ENHANCEMENT OF DIGITAL IMAGERY

In this correspondence, we present a variational approach to the probl em of finding suitable radiometric image transformations that optimize desirable characteristics of the output image histogram. This variati onal approach can be interpreted as the minimization of the cumulative spacing between histogram bars in the least squares sense subject to some weight function. Most of the common histogram transformation proc edures used in remote sensing applications can be deduced from this ge neral variational approach with an appropriate choice of the weight fu nction.