Research On Infrared Imaging Of Subcutaneous Veins

Imaging of subcutaneous veins is important in many applications, such as gaining venous access and vascular surgery. This paper focuses on visualizing subcutaneous veins and Researches on infrared (IR) imaging of subcutaneous veins: reflected IR imaging is used to capture the image, after contrast enhancement, displaying the image on the monitor.Firstly, medical IR imaging has been analyzed, basing on the character of subcutaneous structures IR absorbing, got the theory about the research. Then an IR device comprising a camera, a coaxial IR LED array with the camera, a video-image capturing card, an IR filter was built to capture images of subcutaneous veins. Input the image into the computer, after real-time contrast enhancement, displaying it on the monitor.IR LED array is very important for the device. The experiment results indicated that it could help to get better images.Real-time image contrast enhancing system has been designed. Based on histogram specification, an improved algorithm was researched: Transform the specific histogram into an array, query the array with the statistical histogram of the image that wanted to be enhancing. It is not only simple, flexible, enhancing the image that can not be seen clearly with the eyes, but also improved the speed by a hundred times. It just meets the need of the system.At last, the demonstration contrast enhancing system has been tested on African, and it enhances the veins quite well. The most difficult cases are those attempts to see veins though thick subcutaneous fat, but the test on it also gets good results. So, the system is useful to enhance the contrast of images, it outputs image by near 29 frames per second, and the image is clear and fluent.