Owing to the large errors in the calculation of glint gain in the existing glint recovery algorithms for remote sensing images, the need for near-infrared band information assistance, and the insufficient utilization of remote sensing image information, a glint-detection algorithm based on the water index and chromaticity-separation method and a glint image based on discrete cosine transform are proposed herein. For the proposed recovery algorithm, first, the chromaticity-separation method is used to extract the highlighted areas of the image that are suspected of glint. Then, the scattered points and isolated areas are removed by combining the water index with an area threshold and morphological filtering so as to achieve precise positioning and extraction of the glint area. Then, an optimization function is constructed based on the fidelity and local smoothness of the image, and the discrete cosine transform is used to iteratively solve the pixels inside the glint region of the remote sensing image. Finally, the restored image is obtained. Furthermore, the field flight experiments are conducted. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can accurately extract and restore the image water glint area, and the effect of the restored image in terms of texture and spectral characteristics is improved.