The absorption and scattering of solar radiation by the atmosphere will reduce the brightness and contrast of satellite images. The lower the atmospheric visibility and the higher the satellite spatial resolution, the more obvious this phenomenon, so that the sub-meter spatial resolution optical satellite image under low visibility conditions looks very blurry. The adaptive atmospheric correction algorithm developed based on the radiative transfer equation fully considers the influence of the atmosphere and the surrounding environment of the target on the target radiance at the entrance pupil of the satellite, and quantitatively describes the influence of the reflectance difference between the background pixels and the target pixel on the adjacency effect. The adaptive atmospheric correction algorithm is utilized to perform atmospheric correction on sub-meter spatial resolution satellite images under low atmospheric visibility conditions, and the results are compared with processing results of conventional images. The results show that the quality of the satellite image corrected by the adaptive atmospheric correction algorithm has been significantly improved (the image sharpness increases by 4.5275 times, the image contrast increases by 44.61%, and the image information entropy value increases by 64.22%). Compared to conventional image processing methods that will bring noise and excessive enhancement when improving the quality of satellite images, the adaptive atmospheric correction algorithm will not bring noise and excessive enhancement when improving the quality of satellite images.