Ultra-fast detail enhancement for a short-wave infrared image

Abstract

Image detail enhancement is critical to the performance of short-wave infrared (SWIR) imaging systems, especially to the long-range systems. However, the existing high-performance infrared (IR) image enhancement methods typically have difficulty in meeting the requirements of the imaging system with high resolution and high frame rate. In this paper, we propose an ultra-fast and simple SWIR image detail enhancement method based on the difference of Gaussian (DoG) filter and plateau equalization. Our method consists of efficient edge detail information extraction and histogram equalization. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed method achieves outstanding enhancement performance with a frame rate around 50 fps for 1280 × 1024 SWIR images.