Low-contrast enhancement for electro-optic data

Laser line scan imagery has been found to have fluctuating brightness regions due to high/low signal strengths when scanning data. The low signal strength regions can obscure visibility of potential mines, sometimes to the point of preventing identification by an operator inspecting the data. Two contrast enhancement routines have been developed to enhance obscured objects in the low signal strength regions: a background equalization routine that equalizes the high/low signal strength regions and a local histogram clipping routine that applies a moving window histogram clip to enhance details in the low strength regions without effecting the high strength regions.