ABSTRACT:Aerial remote sensing image is widely used due to its high resolution, abundant information and convenient processing. However, its image quality is easily influenced by clouds and fog. In recent years, fog and haze air pollution is becoming more and more serious in the north of China and its influence on aerial remote sensing image quality is especially obvious. Considering the characters that aerial remote image is usually in huge amount of data and seldom covers sky area, this paper proposes an improved aerial remote sensing image defogging method based on dark channel prior information. First, a 2% linear stretching is applied to eliminate the haze offset effect and provide a better initial value for later defogging processing. Then the dark channel prior image is obtained by calculating the minimum values of r, g, b channels of each pixel directly. Subsequently, according to the particularity of aerial image, the adaptive threshold t0 is set up to improve the defogging effect. Finally, to improve the color cast phenomenon, a way called automatic color method is introduced to enhance the visual effect of defogged image. Experiments are performed on normal image in fog and on aerial remote sensing image in fog. Experimental results prove that the proposed method can obtain the defogged image with better visual effect and image quality. Moreover, the improved method significantly balances the color information in the defogged image and efficiently avoids the color cast phenomenon.