Multi-waveband infrared (IR) sensors capture more spectral information of atmospheric particles and may provide better penetration thru dust under dynamically changing conditions. Therefore, enhancing the visibility of multi-waveband infrared images obtained in degraded visual environment (DVE) is an important way to improve the perception of the environment under DVE conditions. In this paper, we present a system to enhance visibility in DVE conditions by modifying the wavelet coefficients of multi-waveband IR images. In the proposed system, input multi-waveband IR images are transferred into the wavelet domain using an integer lifting wavelet transformation. The low-frequency wavelet coefficients in each waveband are independently modified by an adaptive histogram equalization technique for improving the contrast of the images. To process high-frequency wavelet coefficients, a joint edge-mapping filter is applied to the multi-waveband high-frequency wavelet coefficients to find an edge map for each subband of wavelet coefficients; then a nonlinear filter is used to remove noise and enhance edge coefficients. Finally, the inverse lifting wavelet transformation is applied to the modified multi-waveband wavelet coefficients to obtain enhanced multiwaveband IR images. We tested the proposed system with degraded multi-waveband IR images obtained from a helicopter landing in brownout conditions. Our experimental results show that the proposed system is effective for enhancing the visibility of multi-waveband IR images under DVE conditions.
Visibility enhancement of multi-waveband infrared images from degraded visual environment
Degraded Environments: Sensing, Processing, and Display 2017 ; 2017 ; Anaheim,California,United States
Proc. SPIE ; 10197
2017-05-05
Conference paper
Electronic Resource
English
Fusion for degraded visual environment pilotage
SPIE | 2017
|Channel invariant online visibility enhancement for visual slam in a turbid environment
British Library Online Contents | 2018
|Degraded visual environment image/video quality metrics
SPIE | 2014
|Multi-waveband Infrared Focal Plane Arrays - Recent Trends for Lower-Background Operations
British Library Conference Proceedings | 1999
|Data fusion for a degraded visual environment solution
SPIE | 2015
|