Low contrast and noisy image limits the amount of information conveyed to the user. With the proliferation of digital imagery and computer interface between man-and-machine, it is now viable to consider digital enhancement in the image before presenting it to the user, thus increasing the information throughput. With better contrast, target detection and discrimination can be improved. The paper presents a sequence of filtering operations in frequency and spatial domains to improve the quality of the thermal infrared (IR) images. Basically, two filters – homomorphic filter followed by adaptive Gaussian filter are applied to improve the quality of the thermal IR images. We have systematically evaluated the algorithm on a variety of images and carefully compared it with the techniques presented in the literature. We performed an evaluation of three filter banks such as homomorphic, Gaussian 5×5 and the proposed method, and we have seen that the proposed method yields optimal PSNR for all the thermal images. The results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is efficient for enhancement of thermal IR images. Defence Science Journal, Vol. 64, No. 5, September 2014, pp.451-457, DOI:http://dx.doi.org/10.14429/dsj.64.6873
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