Trying to Color Balance Mosaic Dataset

[JacobCoble]

I am trying to assemble Mosaic Datasets that have some old historical imagery that is over 70 years old. This old imagery is of rather poor quality but it is the only aerial imagery we have going back to the 1930s. We georeferenced the images okay and I can add the tiles to a Mosaic Dataset. But I cannot seem to get the Color Balance Mosaic Dataset to do anything. The images are poor quality, some tiles are light, some are dark. The dark tiles pretty much remain too dark and the light tiles remain too light even after using the Color Balance tool. I was wondering if anyone had a similar situation and found Color Balance tool or other settings that worked well in balancing the differences between tiles of poor quality black and white images.

[JonathanMulder]

Hello,

I've been mosaicking county-wide images from 1958 and 1937/8 for several counties in the Sacramento Valley.  I've experienced the same problem.

My raster mosaic has pixel values ranging from 110 to 202.  I'm wondering if I stretch the pixel range from 1 to 256 if I would get a better image.  So far, I've just used the defaults in the color balance toolbox.

Did you find a way to get a better image?  Also, what imagery are you mosaicking?  My images are from USDA flights; seems they covered a lot of counties in those time frames.

Jonathan Mulder
Engineering Geologist
California Department of Water Resources
Red Bluff, CA

[larryzhang1]

It is good to try the raster function template from the layer's symbology at http://resources.arcgis.com/en/help/main/10.2/index.html#//009t0000024q000000, if the color correction tool/algorithms do not work well.


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Generally, it is challenging �??practically�?? to color balance 'massive' historical images in MD with Color Correction tool in ArcGIS 10.x �?�

If the third-party remote sensing packages like ERDAS ER Mapper are available, it will help effectively pre-process color among multiple images, before adding into MD.