Infrared Image Processing Technology Based On FPGA

Based on the analysis of the imaging principle of Infrared Focal Plane Array (IRFPA) thermal imaging system and its practical application, an effective IRFPA hardware system for real time image processing was designed in this paper. At first, the design of the driving circuits and the relative analog circuits was described based on the imaging theories and the readout circuit's architectures of IRFPA. Then a high-speed infrared image processing system was designed. Considering the characters of great bright background and low contrast between targets and background of infrared images and the exiting nonuniformity noise, the system implemented the histogram projection and two point nonuniformity correction algorithm in real time. Furthermore, it can also be used in other infrared image processing algorithms, especially the image enhance algorithms. Based on the broad research on infrared image enhance algorithms, a image enhance algorithm based on double thresholds was proposed in this paper, which is easy to be implemented with FPGA and has also be practiced successfully . At last, the processed image signal was transformed into RS-343-compatible video signal and displayed on monochrome monitor. Experimental results demonstrate that the designed system can not only process large data stream in real time but also improve the image's quality greatly. Due to the introduction of FPGA, the processing ability of the infrared image processing system was greatly improved.