High-Performance Enhancement of SWIR Images

Abstract

Short-wave infrared imaging technology has rapidly developed over the past decade. However, image detail and contrast enhancement techniques, which are crucial for infrared imaging systems, are rarely dedicated to SWIR imaging systems. Moreover, the existing IR image enhancement methods generally have difficulty providing real-time performance, which plays a significant role in imaging systems with high data rates. In this paper, we propose a simple and real-time SWIR image enhancement approach based on the difference of Gaussian filter and histogram remapping, and illustrate the implementation of the proposed method on FPGA. The experimental results demonstrated that our method achieves promising detail and contrast enhancement performance with a frame rate of around 50 fps for high-definition images, and that extremely high frame rates can be achieved with pipelined architecture.