Adaptive infrared image enhancement algorithm based on improved UM technique

Infrared image enhancement is an important problem of infrared image processing. It gives rise to noise amplification in smooth areas and excessive overshoot in detail areas in the process of classical UM(unsharp masking) algorithm for infrared image enhancement. Aiming at above drawbacks, an adaptive method based on improved UM algorithm for infrared image enhancement is proposed in the paper. Our approach employs an adaptive Gauss-Newton filter to adjust the contrast enhancement parameters in different local areas, making sure that medium-contrast details are enhanced as well as large-contrast details in the process of contrast enhancement, and avoiding noise amplification, detail sharpening distortion and margin overshoot. Experiments show that the algorithm proposed in the paper is effective to improve the SNR and enhance the details of infrared image.