An Efficient Enhancement Technique for Infrared Images

This paper presents an efficient technique for enhancement of infrared (IR) images. It modifies the local luminance mean of an IR image and controls the local contrast as a function of the local luminance mean of the image. The technique first separates an image into both its low-pass and high-pass filtered form components. The low-pass component then controls the amplitude of the high-pass component to increase the local contrast. The low-pass component is then subjected to a non-linearity to modify the local luminance mean of the image and is combined with the processed high-pass component. The performance of this technique when applied to IR images shows good enhancement compared with the other traditional enhancement techniques.