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1 Introduction
An infrared (IR) image provides the visual information that
cannot be detected by the human eye. Therefore, it has been
widely used for not only a military purpose, but also, a civilian
purpose.1 In the early days, the civilian application using
the IR image had been limited to surveillance and weather
forecasting. Recently, it is expanded and adopted in consumer
devices such as the surveillance camera, night vision system
in a vehicle, mobile phone with infrared video, and personal
hand-held camera.
Unlike other images captured by the CCD/CMOS
sensors, the IR image typically has low contrast because the
IR image sensor cannot clearly differentiate the object from
the background if they have a similar emissivity, especially
for long-wave IR images. Therefore, a contrast enhancement
technique is essential to improve visibility of IR images.
In the literature, several image enhancement techniques
have been proposed to improve the contrast of the image.
One of the most popular contrast enhancement techniques
is histogram equalization (HE).2 HE is widely used due to
its low computational complexity and affordable contrast
enhancement capability. However, since the histogram
distribution of the IR image is different from that of the
CCD/CMOS image, it often over-enhances the image, which
means HE is not applicable to the IR image.3
Various methods have been proposed to improve the
performance in terms of the visual quality, most of which are
obtained by modifying HE, for example, bi-HE,4 dualistic
sub-image HE,5 multi-HE,6 histogram modification frameC 2011 SPIE
0091-3286/2011/$25.00
Optical Engineering
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Strengths
Weakness
HE-based
HMF
CLAHE
Tends to overenhance
HVS-based
Stretching
if p(x) > ph ,
p h ,
p(x)
= K [ p(x) pl ] + pl , if pl p(x) ph ,
(1)
pl ,
if p(x) < pl ,
where x is a pixel in an image, K is a stretching gain defined
by
p h pl
K =
,
(2)
ph pl
where ph , pl , p h , and pl denote the upper, lower, stretched
upper and stretched lower pixel value limits, respectively. As
Optical Engineering
(3)
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(b)
(c)
Number of pixels
Number of pixels
Number of pixels
(a)
0.2
0.6
0.4
Graylevel
Graylevel
Graylevel
(d)
(e)
(f)
0.8
Fig. 1 Mountain: (a) Original, (b) histogram equalization, (c) the linear stretched, (d) the histogram of (a), (e) the histogram of (b), (f) the histogram
of (c).
(4)
(5)
2N-1
ph'
xi f
xi f
or equivalently
G = K g.
pl'
0
pl
ph
2N-1
Optical Engineering
(7)
(a)
(c)
Number of pixels
Number of pixels
Number of pixels
(b)
Graylevel
(d)
0.2
0.6
0.4
Graylevel
(e)
0.8
Graylevel
(f)
Fig. 3 The IR image including small and bright area: (a) Original; (b) the linear stretched; (c) the mean-based stretched ( = 3, = 1); (d) the
histogram of (a); (e) the histogram of (b); and (f) the histogram of (c).
E d = d ( f v)2 ,
x f
E=
(E d + E g ),
(8)
E g = g {( f x Gx )2 + ( f y G y )2 },
x f
(c)
(b)
Graylevel
(d)
Number of pixels
Number of pixels
Number of pixels
(a)
(9)
0.2
0.6
0.4
Graylevel
0.8
(e)
0.2
0.4
0.6
Graylevel
0.8
(f)
Fig. 4 The IR image: (a) Original; (b) the linear stretched; (c) the mean-based stretched ( = 3, = 1); (d) the histogram of (a); (e) the histogram
of (b); (f) the histogram of (c).
Optical Engineering
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Calculate
gradient field
G
g
Gradient domain
processing
Original image
Stretching
stretching
gain (K)
= 0.
f
x fx
y fy
v
Stretched image
(10)
Enhanced image
(d /g ) f ( f x x + f yy ) = (d /g )v (Gx + G y ),
Image 1
Image 2
Image 3
Image 4
Image 5
Image 6
Image 7
Image 8
Image 9
Image 10
Image 11
Image 12
Image 13
Image 14
Image 15
Image 16
Image 17
Image 18
Image 19
Image 20
(11)
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(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
(g)
(h)
(i)
Fig. 7 The mean-based stretched image with the limits pl and ph set to m and m + , respectively. and are (a) 1, 1, (b) 1, 2, (c) 1, 3,
(d) 2, 1, (e) 2, 2, (f) 2, 3, (g) 3, 1, (h) 3, 2, and (i) 3, 3.
or equivalently
(d /g ) f f = (d /g )v G,
2
(12)
where f x x and f yy are the horizontal and vertical components of 2 f , the Laplacian of f , respectively, and G
denotes the divergence of G. Equation (12) is a screened
Poisson equation, and finding f is equivalent to solving the
screened Poisson equation. To solve the equation, many solutions have been proposed, such as the conjugate-gradient
method,18 a fast Fourier-domain solver,17 etc. These solutions
are fast enough for real-time processing and the conjugategradient method is adopted in the proposed method. Finally,
by applying the conjugate-gradient method, the final result
f is obtained which minimizes E. For a detailed description of the conjugate-gradient method, the reader may refer to Numerical Recipes in C (Ref. 19) or Shewchuks
paper.18
3 Experimental Results and Analysis
In this section, we verify the performance of the proposed
contrast enhancement scheme. In the simulation, we have
tested 20 IR images, where the resultant images obtained
by the proposed algorithm are provided in Fig. 6. Among
them, the experiments on I mage8, I mage10, and I mage12
with a resolution of 320240 including complex and textured areas (building, trees, etc) are detailed in this paper.
Figure 7 illustrates the mean-based stretched image of the
sample image 12 with varying the coefficients and . As
can be seen, the visual quality of the mean-based stretched
Optical Engineering
Mean-based stretched
Proposed
1
3
2
1
3
2
(a)
(b)
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Fig. 9 Histograms of the original image (top) and the resultant images with the mean-based stretching (middle) and the proposed scheme
(bottom). (a) Image8, (b) Image10, and (c) Image12.
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
Fig. 10 Image 8: (a) Original; (b) the mean-based stretching, (c) perception-based contrast enhancement; (d) CLAHE; (e) adaptive countershading; (f) the proposed.
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(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
Fig. 11 Image 10: (a) Original; (b) the mean-based stretching; (c) perception based contrast enhancement, (d) CLAHE; (e) adaptive countershading; (f) the proposed.
(a)
(b)
(c)
(d)
(e)
(f)
Fig. 12 Image 12: (a) Original; (b) the mean-based stretching; (c) perception-based contrast enhancement; (d) CLAHE; (e) adaptive countershading; (f) the proposed.
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Image
MS
PCE
ACS
CLAHE
Proposed
Image
MS
PCE
ACS
CLAHE
Proposed
12.4
584.2
80.3
341.9
22.4
0.19
0.01
0.05
0.11
0.05
12.7
1091.8
80.7
335.9
22.7
0.01
0.11
0.04
0.20
0.01
12.5
1084.7
80.7
346.2
22.4
0.05
0.03
0.04
0.11
0.05
12.6
520.1
81.1
344.6
26.8
0.12
0.09
0.07
0.20
0.02
12.7
1099.3
81.0
354.3
23.5
0.09
0.15
0.12
12.8
550.4
81.7
342.1
22.8
0.11
0.09
0.07
0.14
0.01
13.3
679.0
85.2
337.9
23.4
0.09
0.05
0.05
0.18
12.6
2364.7
81.4
342.1
23.3
0.02
0.11
0.08
0.06
0.02
12.7
444.1
81.1
340.3
22.6
0.09
0.05
0.06
0.10
10
12.5
1598.1
81.3
340.5
22.8
10
0.02
0.15
0.07
0.09
11
12.7
548.8
81.6
335.8
22.8
11
0.14
0.14
0.05
0.21
0.01
12
12.8
1214.7
85.1
342.0
22.7
12
0.07
0.13
0.10
0.08
0.01
13
12.6
481.2
80.3
343.4
26.3
13
0.07
0.02
0.13
0.11
0.01
14
12.5
904.5
81.2
342.2
22.6
14
0.05
0.16
0.08
0.15
0.02
15
12.8
2034.6
81.2
340.8
22.7
15
0.07
0.05
0.07
0.15
0.01
16
12.6
2128.4
85.8
342.6
22.3
16
0.03
0.09
0.06
0.09
17
12.7
2294.4
85.1
338.4
22.1
17
0.03
0.08
0.07
0.08
18
12.5
1058.7
81.5
341.9
22.7
18
0.11
0.02
0.07
0.16
0.01
19
12.6
362.2
81.0
336.9
22.7
19
0.03
0.07
0.07
0.21
0.01
20
12.6
553.6
86.9
342.0
24.8
20
0.03
0.08
0.06
0.21
0.01
Average
12.7
1079.9
82.2
341.6
23.2
Average
0.07
0.08
0.07
0.14
0.01
(13)
bk f
(14)
where m(bk ) is the mean of the pixel value of the kth block
bk in the image. m min and m max denote the minimum and
maximum value of the mean. M(bk ) is a normalized mean
value, Mo and Mt denote the means of the original and target,
respectively. If R is close to zero, the global contrast of the
target image is similar to the one of the original, which means
the global contrast of the original is preserved. In Table 3, it
is observed that the BME of the proposed method is smaller
than others.
4 Conclusion
In this paper, we proposed the new contrast enhancement
scheme for the IR image using detail-preserving stretching.
The proposed method is posed as a minimization problem
that balances preservation of the gradient with preservation
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the Agency for Defense Development (ADD) under the project Local area processing
for EO/IR image and by Mid-career Researcher Program
through a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF)
grant funded by the Korea government (MEST) (No. 20110000200).
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Optical Engineering
Seung-Won Jung received BS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering in 2005 and
2011, respectively, from Korea University,
Seoul, Korea. He is now a post-doctoral research fellow in the Research Institute of Information and Communication Technology,
Korea University, Seoul, Korea. His research
interests include image enhancement, image
restoration, video compression, and computer vision.
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