Adaptive Remote Sensing Image Enhancement for KOMPSAT Imagery

Remote sensing images are often degraded by atmospheric effects, low illumination, and off-nadir viewing, which reduces the segmentation performance of deep models. KOMPSAT (Korea Multi-Purpose Satellite) imagery suffers from quality degradation because the Korean Peninsula is surrounded by sea on three sides and is subject to frequent weather and atmospheric variations. In practice, operators apply heuristic image enhancement techniques by hand, but these approaches are labor-intensive and inconsistent. To address this issue, we have proposed Adaptive Remote Sensing Image Enhancement (ARSIE), an automated reinforcement learning–based framework that improves segmentation performance on degraded KOMPSAT imagery. ARSIE takes only an existing segmentation network and training data as input, and learns, for each image, a sequence of enhancement operations selected from a filter pool. The policy network uses intermediate feature maps from the segmentation model to choose the next operation, ensuring that enhancement decisions directly support downstream segmentation performance. Experimental results show that ARSIE automatically discovers image-specific enhancement combinations and consistently improves segmentation accuracy on degraded KOMPSAT imagery. We demonstrate that ARSIE has the potential to be extended to improving the quality of other satellite imagery.