Flicker-Free Adaptive Enhancement for Infrared Video

Infrared videos often suffer from low contrast and insufficient texture. In order to improve poor visual effect, a novel infrared video enhancement method is proposed, which contains intra-frame brightness enhancement and inter-frame brightness continuity adjustment. In intra-frame brightness enhancement, it has two steps including global contrast enhancement and local details enhancement. To global contrast enhancement, the processed image contrast by geometric distribution, and it is incorporated into an optimization problem with a sorted histogram of each frame to yield a modified histogram. To local details enhancement, after Retinex decomposition, the reflection component is magnified by boundary preserving filter, and this strategy can effectively suppress noise in relatively uniform regions. Furthermore, to maintain inter-frame brightness continuity, adaptive parameters are introduced through optical flow to control the combination ratio of geometric distribution histogram, in which the enhancement degree of each frame can be adjusted according to inter-frame similarity and the moving region are enhanced adaptively according to the change of each frame. Experimental results demonstrate that proposed algorithm can effectively enhance the contrast and detail of infrared video, and improve the visual effect in subjective and objective quality evaluation.