Radiometric normalization with multi-temporal satellite images is essential for time series analysis and change detection. Generally, relative radiometric normalization, which is an image-based method, is performed, and histogram matching is a representative method for normalizing the non-linear properties. However, since it utilizes global statistical information only, local information is not considered at all. Thus, this paper proposes a histogram matching method considering local information. The proposed method divides histograms based on density, mean, and standard deviation of image intensities, and performs histogram matching locally on the sub-histogram. The matched histogram is then further partitioned and this process is performed again, iteratively, controlled with the wasserstein distance. Finally, the proposed method is compared to global histogram matching. The experimental results show that the proposed method is visually and quantitatively superior to the conventional method, which indicates the applicability of the proposed method to the radiometric normalization of multi-temporal images with non-linear properties.

Keywords: Local-Based Iterative Histogram Matching, Wasserstein Distance, Relative Radiometric Normalization, Non-Linear