A New High-Dynamic-Range Compression and Detail Enhancement Algorithm for Infrared Images

Infrared images have the high dynamic range characteristic, generally digitized to 14 bit. While most display devices can only show 8 bit images, so high bit-wide infrared image signal should be compressed to low bit-wide display data without losing the important detail information. A new high-dynamic-range compression and detail enhancement algorithm for infrared images is presented in this paper. In the proposed algorithm, the original infrared image is separated into the low-frequency base component and the high-frequency detail component. Then the base component is compressed with the simple gray level linear mapping, and the detail component is enhanced with the S-curve transformation. Finally, the two components are combined to get the 8 bit enhanced image. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve the dynamic range compression while effectively preserve and enhance the local detail information.