In urban aerial images

the poor visibility of features in shadowed regions created by buildings prevents recognition of objects.It is necessary to compensate and remove the shadowed region.In this paper

a fuzzy retinex is proposed to overcome the limitation of the well known image enhancement technique—retinex.The fuzzy retinex restricts the center/surround spatially contrast operation in region with homogeneous illumination so that the robustness of retinex is reinforced in scene with strongly variational illumination.Based on the fuzzy segmentation of an image into shadowed and unshadowed regions

shadows are compensated and removed using the fuzzy retinex while the natural tint of original image is retained.The proposed method enriches the research and application domain of the retinex.Experimental results are given to show its effectiveness.