Performance evaluation of image enhancement techniques on night vision imagery

摘要

Recently new techniques for night-vision cameras are developed. Digital image-intensifiers are becoming available on the market. Also, so-called EMCCD (electro-magnified) cameras are developed, which can also record imagery in dim conditions. In this paper we present data recorded with both types of cameras (image-intensifiers and EMCCD cameras) in dim light conditions, and present the results of image enhancement on this data. The image enhancement techniques applied are noise reduction, super-resolution reconstruction and local adaptive contrast enhancement. Comparing the results from both cameras indicates that the image intensifier performs better at the dim conditions and the EMCCD camera performs somewhat better at the bright conditions.