Retrospective Illumination Correction of Grayscale Historical Aerial Photos

Illumination correction is a method aiming at removing the influence of light from the environment and other distorting factors in the image capture process. A novel algorithm based on Luminance Mapping is proposed that both removes the low frequency variations in intensity as well as increases the contrast in low contrast areas. Moreover, it avoids the common problems with Homomorphic filters. This algorithm is being applied on historical aerial photos with good results.